Many people are hoping for wind and solar PV to transform grid electricity in a favorable way. Is this really possible? Is it really feasible for intermittent renewables to generate a large share of grid electricity? The answer increasingly looks as if it is, “No, the costs are too great, and the return on investment would be way too low.” We are already encountering major grid problems, even with low penetrations of intermittent renewable electricity: US, 5.4% of 2015 electricity consumption; China, 3.9%; Germany, 19.5%; Australia, 6.6%.
In fact, I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that even if wind turbines and solar PV could be built at zero cost, it would not make sense to continue to add them to the electric grid in the absence of very much better and cheaper electricity storage than we have today. There are too many costs outside building the devices themselves. It is these secondary costs that are problematic. Also, the presence of intermittent electricity disrupts competitive prices, leading to electricity prices that are far too low for other electricity providers, including those providing electricity using nuclear or natural gas. The tiny contribution of wind and solar to grid electricity cannot make up for the loss of more traditional electricity sources due to low prices.
Leaders around the world have demanded that their countries switch to renewable energy, without ever taking a very close look at what the costs and benefits were likely to be. A few simple calculations were made, such as “Life Cycle Assessment” and “Energy Returned on Energy Invested.” These calculations miss the fact that the intermittent energy being returned is of very much lower quality than is needed to operate the electric grid. They also miss the point that timing and the cost of capital are very important, as is the impact on the pricing of other energy products. This is basically another example of a problem I wrote about earlier, Overly Simple Energy-Economy Models Give Misleading Answers.
Let’s look at some of the issues that we are encountering, as we attempt to add intermittent renewable energy to the electric grid.
Issue 1. Grid issues become a problem at low levels of intermittent electricity penetration.
In 2015, wind and solar PV amounted to only 12.2% of total electricity consumed in Hawaii, based on EIA data. Even at this low level, Hawaii is encountering sufficiently serious grid problems that it has needed to stop net metering (giving homeowners credit for the retail cost of electricity, when electricity is sold to the grid) and phase out subsidies.
Figure 1. Hawaii Electricity Production, based on EIA data. Other Disp. electricity is the sum of various other non-intermittent electricity sources, including geothermal and biomass burned as fuel.
Hawaii consists of a chain of islands, so it cannot import electricity from elsewhere. This is what I mean by “Generation = Consumption.” There is, of course, some transmission line loss with all electrical generation, so generation and consumption are, in fact, slightly different.
The situation is not too different in California. The main difference is that California can import non-intermittent (also called “dispatchable”) electricity from elsewhere. It is really the ratio of intermittent electricity to total electricity that is important, when it comes to balancing. California is running into grid issues at a similar level of intermittent electricity penetration (wind + solar PV) as Hawaii–about 12.3% of electricity consumed in 2015, compared to 12.2% for Hawaii.
Figure 2. California electricity consumption, based on EIA data. Other Disp. is the sum of other non-intermittent sources, including geothermal and biomass burned for electricity generation.
Even with growing wind and solar production, California is increasingly dependent on non-intermittent electricity imported from other states.
Issue 2. The apparent “lid” on intermittent electricity at 10% to 15% of total electricity consumption is caused by limits on operating reserves.
Electric grids are set up with “operating reserves” that allow the electric grid to maintain stability, even if a large unit, such as a nuclear power plant, goes offline. These operating reserves typically handle fluctuations of 10% to 15% in the electricity supply.
If additional adjustment is needed, it is possible to take some commercial facilities offline, based on agreements offering lower rates for interruptible supply. It is also possible for certain kinds of power plants, particularly hydroelectric and natural gas “peaker plants,” to ramp production up or down quickly. Combined cycle natural gas plants also provide reasonably fast response.
In theory, changes can be made to the system to allow the system to be more flexible. One such change is adding more long distance transmission, so that the variable electricity can be distributed over a wider area. This way the 10% to 15% operational reserve “cap” applies more broadly. Another approach is adding energy storage, so that excess electricity can be stored until needed later. A third approach is using a “smart grid” to make changes, such as turning off all air conditioners and hot water heaters when electricity supply is inadequate. All of these changes tend to be slow to implement and high in cost, relative to the amount of intermittent electricity that can be added because of their implementation.
Issue 3. When there is no other workaround for excess intermittent electricity, it must be curtailed–that is, dumped rather than added to the grid.
Overproduction without grid capacity was a significant problem in Texas in 2009, causing about 17% of wind energy to be curtailed in 2009. At that time, wind energy amounted to about 5.0% of Texas’s total electricity consumption. The problem has mostly been fixed, thanks to a series of grid upgrades allowing wind energy to flow better from western Texas to eastern Texas.
Figure 3. Texas electricity net generation based on EIA data. The Texas grid is separate, so there is no imported or exported electricity.
In 2015, total intermittent electricity from wind and solar amounted to only 10.1% of Texas electricity. Solar has never been large enough to be visible on the chart–only 0.1% of consumption in 2015. The total amount of intermittent electricity consumed in Texas is only now beginning to reach the likely 10% to 15% limit of operational reserves. Thus, it is “behind” Hawaii and California in reaching intermittent electricity limits.
Based on the modeling of the company that oversees the California electric grid, electricity curtailment in California is expected to be significant by 2024, if the 40% California Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) is followed, and changes are not made to fix the problem.
Issue 4. When all costs are included, including grid costs and indirect costs, such as the need for additional storage, the cost of intermittent renewables tends to be very high.
In Europe, there is at least a reasonable attempt to charge electricity costs back to consumers. In the United States, renewable energy costs are mostly hidden, rather than charged back to consumers. This is easy to do, because their usage is still low.
Euan Mearns finds that in Europe, the greater the proportion of wind and solar electricity included in total generation, the higher electricity prices are for consumers.
Figure 5. Figure by Euan Mearns showing relationship between installed wind + solar capacity and European electricity rates. Source Energy Matters.
The five countries shown in red have all had financial difficulties. High electricity prices may have contributed to their problems.
The United States is not shown on this chart, since it is not part of Europe. If it were, it would be a bit below, and to the right of, Czech Republic and Romania.
Issue 5. The amount that electrical utilities are willing to pay for intermittent electricity is very low.
The big question is, “How much value does adding intermittent electricity add to the electrical grid?” Clearly, adding intermittent electricity allows a utility to reduce the amount of fossil fuel energy that it might otherwise purchase. In some cases, the addition of solar electricity slightly reduces the amount of new generation needed. This reduction occurs because of the tendency of solar to offer supply when the usage of air conditioners is high on summer afternoons. Of course, in advanced countries, the general tendency of electricity usage is down, thanks to more efficient light bulbs and less usage by computer screens and TV monitors.
At the same time, the addition of intermittent electricity adds a series of other costs:
- Many more hook-ups to generation devices are needed. Homes now need two-way connections, instead of one-way connections. Someone needs to service these connections and check for problems.
- Besides intermittency problems, the mix of active and reactive power may be wrong. The generation sources may cause frequency deviations larger than permitted by regulations.
- More long-distance electricity transmission lines are needed, so that the new electricity can be distributed over a wide enough area that it doesn’t cause oversupply problems when little electricity is needed (such as weekends in the spring and fall).
- As electricity is transported over longer distances, there is more loss in transport.
- To mitigate some of these problems, there is a need for electricity storage. This adds two kinds of costs: (1) Cost for the storage device, and (2) Loss of electricity in the process.
- As I will discuss later, intermittent energy tends to lead to very low wholesale electricity prices. Other electricity providers need to be compensated for the effects these low prices cause; otherwise they will leave the market.
To sum up, when intermittent electricity is added to the electric grid, the primary savings are fuel savings. At the same time, significant costs of many different types are added, acting to offset these savings. In fact, it is not even clear that when a comparison is made, the benefits of adding intermittent electricity are greater than the costs involved.
According to the EIA’s 2015 Wind Technologies Market Report, the major way intermittent electricity is sold to electric utilities is as part of long term Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), typically lasting for 20 years. Utilities buy PPAs as a way of hedging against the possibility that natural gas prices will rise in the future. The report indicates that the recent selling price for PPAs is about $25 to $28 per MWh (Figure 6). This is equivalent to 2.5 to 2.8 cents per kWh, which is very inexpensive.
Figure 6. EIA exhibit showing the median and mean cost of wind PPAs compared to EIA’s forecast price of natural gas, from 2015 Wind Technologies Market Report.
In effect, what utilities are trying to do is hedge against rising fuel prices of whatever kind they choose to purchase. They may even be able to afford to make other costly changes, such as more transmission lines and energy storage, so that more intermittent electricity can be accommodated.
Issue 6. When intermittent electricity is sold in competitive electricity markets (as it is in California, Texas, and Europe), it frequently leads to negative wholesale electricity prices. It also shaves the peaks off high prices at times of high demand.
In states and countries that use competitive pricing (rather than utility pricing, used in some states), the wholesale price of electricity price varies from minute to minute, depending on the balance between supply and demand. When there is an excess of intermittent electricity, wholesale prices often become negative. Figure 7 shows a chart by a representative of the company that oversees the California electric grid.
Figure 7. Exhibit showing problem of negative electricity prices in California, from a presentation at the 2016 EIA Annual Conference.
Clearly, the number of negative price spikes increases, as the proportion of intermittent electricity increases. A similar problem with negative prices has been reported in Texas and in Europe.
When solar energy is included in the mix of intermittent fuels, it also tends to reduce peak afternoon prices. Of course, these minute-by-minute prices don’t really flow back to the ultimate consumers, so it doesn’t affect their demand. Instead, these low prices simply lead to lower funds available to other electricity producers, most of whom cannot quickly modify electricity generation.
To illustrate the problem that arises, Figure 8, prepared by consultant Paul-Frederik Bach, shows a comparison of Germany’s average wholesale electricity prices (dotted line) with residential electricity prices for a number of European countries. Clearly, wholesale electricity prices have been trending downward, while residential electricity prices have been rising. In fact, if prices for nuclear, natural gas, and coal-fired electricity had been fair prices for these other providers, residential electricity prices would have trended upward even more quickly than shown in the graph!
Figure 8. Residential Electricity Prices in Europe, together with Germany spot wholesale price, from http://pfbach.dk/firma_pfb/references/pfb_towards_50_pct_wind_in_denmark_2016_03_30.pdf
Note that the recent average wholesale electricity price is about 30 euros per MWh, which is equivalent to 3.0 cents per kWh. In US dollars this would equate to $36 per MWh, or 3.6 cents per kWh. These prices are higher than prices paid by PPAs for intermittent electricity ($25 to $28 per MWh), but not a whole lot higher.
The problem we encounter is that prices in the $36 MWh range are too low for almost every kind of energy generation. Figure 9 from Bloomberg is from 2013, so is not entirely up to date, but gives an idea of the basic problem.
Figure 9. Global leveled cost of energy production by Bloomberg.
A price of $36 per MWh is way down at the bottom of the chart, between 0 and 50. Pretty much no energy source can be profitable at such a level. Too much investment is required, relative to the amount of energy produced. We reach a situation where nearly every kind of electricity provider needs subsidies. If they cannot receive subsidies, many of them will close, leaving the market with only a small amount of unreliable intermittent electricity, and little back-up capability.
This same problem with falling wholesale prices, and a need for subsidies for other energy producers, has been noted in California and Texas. The Wall Street Journal ran an article earlier this week about low electricity prices in Texas, without realizing that this was a problem caused by wind energy, not a desirable result!
Issue 7. Other parts of the world are also having problems with intermittent electricity.
Germany is known as a world leader in intermittent electricity generation. Its intermittent generation hit 12.2% of total generation in 2012. As you will recall, this is the level where California and Hawaii started to reach grid problems. By 2015, its intermittent electricity amounted to 19.5% of total electricity generated.
Figure 10. German electricity generated, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2016.
Needless to say, such high intermittent electricity generation leads to frequent spikes in generation. Germany chose to solve this problem by dumping its excess electricity supply on the European Union electric grid. Poland, Czech Republic, and Netherlands complained to the European Union. As a result, the European Union mandated that from 2017 onward, all European Union countries (not just Germany) can no longer use feed-in tariffs. Doing so provides too much of an advantage to intermittent electricity providers. Instead, EU members must use market-responsive auctioning, known as “feed-in premiums.” Germany legislated changes that went even beyond the minimum changes required by the European Union. Dörte Fouquet, Director of the European Renewable Energy Federation, says that the German adjustments will “decimate the industry.”
In Australia, one recent headline was Australia Considers Banning Wind Power Because It’s Causing Blackouts. The problem seems to be in South Australia, where the last coal-fired power plants are closing because subsidized wind is leading to low wholesale electricity prices. Australia, as a whole, does not have a high intermittent electricity penetration ratio (6.6% of 2015 electricity consumption), but grid limitations mean that South Australia is disproportionately affected.
China has halted the approval of new wind turbine installations in North China because it does not have grid capacity to transport intermittent electricity to more populated areas. Also, most of China’s electricity production is from coal, and it is difficult to use coal to balance with wind and solar because coal-fired plants can only be ramped up slowly. China’s total use of wind and solar is not very high (3.9% of consumption in 2015), but it is already encountering major difficulties in grid integration.
Issue 8. The amount of subsidies provided to intermittent electricity is very high.
The renewable energy program in the United States consists of overlapping local, state, and federal programs. It includes mandates, feed-in tariffs, exemption from taxes, production tax credits, and other devices. This combination of approaches makes it virtually impossible to figure out the amount of the subsidy by adding up the pieces. We are pretty certain, however, that the amount is high. According to the National Wind Watch Organization,
At the federal level, the production or investment tax credit and double-declining accelerated depreciation can pay for two-thirds of a wind power project. Additional state incentives, such as guaranteed markets and exemption from property taxes, can pay for another 10%.
If we believe this statement, the developer only pays about 23% of the cost of a wind energy project.
The US Energy Information Administration prepared an estimate of certain types of subsidies (those provided by the federal government and targeted particularly at energy) for the year 2013. These amounted to a total of $11.3 billion for wind and solar combined. About 183.3 terawatts of wind and solar energy was sold during 2013, at a wholesale price of about 2.8 cents per kWh, leading to a total selling price of $5.1 billion dollars. If we add the wholesale price of $5.1 billion to the subsidy of $11.3 billion, we get a total of $16.4 billion paid to developers or used in special grid expansion programs. This subsidy amounts to 69% of the estimated total cost. Any subsidy from states, or from other government programs, would be in addition to the amount from this calculation.
Paul-Frederik Bach shows a calculation of wind energy subsidies in Denmark, comparing the prices paid under the Public Service Obligation (PSO) system to the market price for wind. His calculations show that both the percentage and dollar amount of subsidies have been rising. In 2015, subsidies amounted to 66% of the total PSO cost.
Figure 11. Amount of subsidy for wind energy in Netherlands, as calculated by comparing paid for wind under PSO with market value of wind energy. Exhibit from http://www.pfbach.dk/firma_pfb/references/pfb_towards_50_pct_wind_in_denmark_2016_03_30.pdf
In a sense, these calculations do not show the full amount of subsidy. If renewables are to replace fossil fuels, they must pay taxes to governments, just as fossil fuel providers do now. Energy providers are supposed to provide “net energy” to the system. The way that they share this net energy with governments is by paying taxes of various kinds–income taxes, property taxes, and special taxes associated with extraction. If intermittent renewables are to replace fossil fuels, they need to provide tax revenue as well. Current subsidy calculations don’t consider the high taxes paid by fossil fuel providers, and the need to replace these taxes, if governments are to have adequate revenue.
Also, the amount and percentage of required subsidy for intermittent renewables can be expected to rise over time, as more areas exceed the limits of their operating reserves, and need to build long distance transmission to spread intermittent electricity over a larger area. This seems to be happening in Europe now. In 2015, the revenue generated by the wholesale price of intermittent electricity amounted to about 13.1 billion euros, according to my calculations. In order to expand further, policy advisor Daniel Genz with Vattenfall indicates that grids across Europe will need to be upgraded, at a cost of between 100 and 400 billion euros. In other words, grid expenditures will be needed that amount to between 7.6 and 30.5 times wholesale revenues received from intermittent electricity in 2015. Most of this will likely need to come from additional subsidies, because there is no possibility that the return on this investment can be very high.
There is also the problem of the low profit levels for all of the other electricity providers, when intermittent renewables are allowed to sell their electricity whenever it becomes available. One potential solution is huge subsidies for other providers. Another is buying a lot of energy storage, so that energy from peaks can be saved and used when supply is low. A third solution is requiring that renewable energy providers curtail their production when it is not needed. Any of these solutions is likely to require subsidies.
Conclusion
We already seem to be reaching limits with respect to intermittent electricity supply. The US Energy Information Administration may be reaching the same conclusion. It chose Steve Kean from Kinder Morgan (a pipeline company) as its keynote speaker at its July 2016 Annual Conference. He made the following statements about renewable energy.
Figure 12. Excerpt from Keynote Address slide at US Energy Administration Conference by Steve Kean of Kinder Morgan.
This view is very similar to mine. Few people have stopped to realize that intermittent electricity isn’t worth very much. It may even have negative value, when the cost of all of the adjustments needed to make it useful are considered.
Energy products are very different in “quality.” Intermittent electricity is of exceptionally low quality. The costs that intermittent electricity impose on the system need to be paid by someone else. This is a huge problem, especially as penetration levels start exceeding the 10% to 15% level that can be handled by operating reserves, and much more costly adjustments must be made to accommodate this energy. Even if wind turbines and solar panels could be produced for $0, it seems likely that the costs of working around the problems caused by intermittent electricity would be greater than the compensation that can be obtained to fix those problems.
The situation is a little like adding a large number of drunk drivers, or of self-driving cars that don’t really work as planned, to a highway system. In theory, other drivers can learn to accommodate them, if enough extra lanes are added, and the concentration of the poorly operating vehicles is kept low enough. But a person needs to understand exactly what the situation is, and understand the cost of all of the adjustments that need to be made, before agreeing to allow the highway system to add more poorly behaving vehicles.
In An Updated Version of the Peak Oil Story, I talked about the fact that instead of oil “running out,” it is becoming too expensive for our economy to accommodate. The economy does not perform well when the cost of energy products is very high. The situation with new electricity generation is similar. We need electricity products to be well-behaved (not act like drunk drivers) and low in cost, if they are to be successful in growing the economy. If we continue to add large amounts of intermittent electricity to the electric grid without paying attention to these problems, we run the risk of bringing the whole system down.
Don’t think we need to worry too much about deforestation, at least for the majority of the BAU population. Needed to cut back a fast growing “Flame Tree” and used a manual craftsman 20″ bow saw. Let me tell you, the amount of exertion and calories consumed for amount of wood obtained would cause a person to shed much weight. Also, I was accidental cut in the finger and was lucky to use crazy glue to close it and avoid stitches. If I needed to store up 3- 4 cords of wood for the winter and cut a supply for daily cooking….I would need some serious bulk food intact to keep going. Yep, are we in for a rude awakening when our energy slaves retire
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc3FwLAy_d4
Boy, just can’t wait…there will be a fast weeding out of clueless people.
Great saw.
In the past, there were no industrial forests with thick trunks of the trees cut down in the age of around hundred years, but the sprout forests where the thin wood was regulary cut away.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Coppicing_-_geograph.org.uk_-_99219.jpg
Source: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%BDmladkov%C3%BD_les
Is that right? “None”? Come on now….how did the sailing ships get constructed or timber framed dwellings get built? Please MG, don’t get me wrong…I know what you are referring to is coppice…
https://www.bowhayestrees.co.uk/logging-information
It will be interesting to see if these can be “managed” in an orderly manner.
BTW…bow saws are terrific…I own many styles in both wood and steel.
Stock up on extra blades…will be in much demand in the years ahead.
In Medieval times forests were off limits to the peasants…read where those poor souls freezing to death for lack of wood petitioned the King to burn coal!
Also read these ancient people planned ahead….if they built roof beams with wood that attracted wood borers or the like insect pests…would plant a section of that specie of tree to be ready for replacement!
It will be fascinating how all this plays out…
One of my idols is Roy Underhill of the Woodwrights Shop on PBS TV a true bodger!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2TsRkTRbuIk
Fascinating! Brings back many memories.
I started out in a 19th century village in the country, very long ago. Wood was plentiful and carpenters were skilled. Later in life, I gravitated to museums, and so have a visceral understanding of wood’s resourcefulness, its ability to make machines included. Yes, there needs to be iron for tools and small parts, but procuring that grade of metal at such a small scale doesn’t seem impossible to do again.
My wife is familiar with Underhill, and would dearly like me to do some carpentry. Perversely, however, I refuse, greatly preferring to work with cardboard. Much easier. Far fewer tools. Anybody can do it. 🙂
Artleads, have you tried your hand at green woodworking? Works like butter and slices like a block of cheese. Here is a clip of retired lawyer, now chair maker, John Alexander explaining how in this video…recommend his book
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T1o22ICVxo4
Another remarkable craftsman that wrote “Welsh Stick Chairs”, a scarce out of print book, is John Brown that promoted the simple artistic life of hand tool creating. Wrote a column for the magazine “Good Woodworking” until his death in 2008.
http://tonykonovaloff.com/?page_id=54
“My grandmother used to tell me that most of life’s ills were caused by men chasing money. Even fifty years ago the poor old dear could not understand what all the rush was about. She had a theory that the heartbeat hadn’t altered since time began, and that the pace of life should be regulated by this fact. I didn’t take any notice of her at the time, but recently I’ve had cause to recall her words. The speed of life is out of synchronisation with the human body. If we could slow our lives down a little, think of quality before quantity, there would be more time to sabour the pleasant things before we are force to rush on to something else.
I would not go so far as to say that there are no skills necessary to working machines. It is important to be able to read and interpret complicated instructions. What you end up with is engineering skills – precision engineering in wood.
Woodworkers should look anew at their hand tools. Take the meanest, rusty plane, clean it, grind the blade and sharpen it – like a razor – then set it up, cap iron, mouth opening, there are plenty of books to tell you how if you don’t know. Now, set very fine, run it over a scrap of oak. Hear the sound it makes (you can tell a sharp plane by the sound), and feel the perfect finish. Use a sharp chisel, what a thrill
There are others that voice the same and as we slow down again to the beat of a heart we will once again hear and also listen.
Of course, the rusty plane and the blade are a product of our modern society. We can sharpen the blade and clean the plane, but in not very long we will need to make a new one. This is much harder to do when supply chains are gone, and the easy to extract (and convenient to extract) iron has mostly been extracted.
It is fun to do these things, but they aren’t a long-term solution, unless we can figure out how to make blades and other essential pieces of the system.
I am pitching a script… MacGyver 2 – The Movie…
It involves a guy (without a mullet cut) who survives the end of BAU — he ends up being the guy who fixes all the gear for mad Max….
http://img2.tvtome.com/i/u/5e679c8240f04370c3d456cf06326938.jpg
Thanks, Vince. This guy is the greatest. You could transfer a lot of his approach onto cardboard too. 🙂 And was the intro music by Thelonious Monk?!!!!!
Gail, please forgive me for saying you and will long gone before that plane blade needs replacing. Actually, if you watch the beginning of the Woodwrights shop 20th anniversary show it has Roy Underhill explaining the mission of his show in his first show
He exclaimed that not long ago folks literally crafted most of what they needed by using sunlight to grow food in their garden and using muscle/intellect energy to utilized local materials, such as wood, stone, clay, metals ect into useful items. Roy has been showing us for decades remarkable techniques that were devised by “common” people that would outdo MacGyver.
BTW, wooden planes need very little as far as metal….the “best” planes in the world were/are made in Japan. The blacksmith spent many hours concentrating on the blade, overlapping the cutting edge to create superior cutting that produces a surface which needs no sanding. Roy Underhill has a clip of such in my link.
Craftsman of necessity were remarkable and hopefully their folk knowledge will not all be lost.
‘Craftsman of necessity were remarkable and hopefully their folk knowledge will not all be lost.’
were….
So collapse hits… I am out of business… my skill are few and quite specialized… without BAU I am about as useless as a tribesman from the Amazon on Wall Street….
What happens then — amongst the carnage and chaos and starvation and violence…
Do I sign up for a retraining programme at the local community college? Will there be hunter gatherer course? Perhaps woodworking? Blacksmith courses?
Will this be called the BAU Training Transition Initiative — where modern man learns the primitive skills of survival in the New Normal.
Well, Fast Eddie, don’t sell future generations short. Innate knowledge is surrounding us all and all we need to do is apply the antenna to connect. Yes, there surely will be a lot of “reinventing the wheel” and we can guess the future ( like that at all really matters!).
My hope is on our way to the dustbin of ecological history we don’t end it all with a mushroom cloud. The spent fuel rods don’t concern me so much…..nature will find a way around them, but if we blow this rock to pieces…shame on us!
unfortunately the wheel was our ultimate invention after we mastered the control of fire.
this is why ”re inventing” it is so amusing—as if there is some alternative out there just waiting to give us all a lift to the next stage of evolution.
humankind has lifted itself on the leverage of physics.
The wheel is nothing more than a lever. We just found better and faster ways of making it go round that’s all—-but we did not change what it is.
The Middle Ages saw a big deforestation of Europe.
“The consequences of medieval forest use may be summed up as follows: many cohesive forest areas were largely destroyed, due mainly to the felling of trees for firewood. Even the most remote forest areas were affected. What remained was a landscape whose devastation is still recognizable, for example, the treeless hill ridges, the moorland and the present distribution of tree species in the central European forests.
The dwindling forests that did not regenerate themselves led to erosion of the soils, including those suitable for agricultural, in the wake of which, fields and settlements had to be abandoned. The result was a shortage of supply, especially in time of war. Given the devastating effects of overexploitation arising for the reasons set out above, territorial lords imposed official regulations for the use of woodland, a case in point being the 1579 Hohenlohe Forest regulations.”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_forest_in_Central_Europe
Also the climate started to be colder. That is why the move to coal was needed, as the system needed another energy source. Before the coal era, the population started to collapse, as the energy limits were reached:
“By 1450, the total population of Europe was substantially below that of 150 years earlier, but all classes overall had a higher standard of living.[1]
Regardless of the cause, populations continued to fall into the 15th century and remained low into the 16th.”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography
“Regardless of the cause, populations continued to fall into the 15th century and remained low into the 16th.”
So the idea that it was overpopulation that drove American occupation is incorrect?
timber usage follows its own, rather vague, set of rules and formulae.
You cannot cut a ton of tree and cart it 50 miles by horse-power just to burn as firewood. EROEI too low.
you can cut a ton of tree and cart it 50 miles to build a ship or windmill because that enables you to create a structure that itself returns a very high EROEI. This was how the pre-iron British navy was constructed
Hence deforestation took place by “settlements” which used up a circle of forest resources over a period of time, and then moved on by whatever distance/resources/markets dictated
Eventually of course British forest were destroyed, and we had to look for other materials to replace wood
Peak Wood… we see the same result in the US re: oil…. foreign policy is driven by oil…
‘used up a circle of forest resources’
This is an excellent insight … once the circle hits an EROEI threshold…. the forests will not be cut..
Very similar to the situation now with oil…
Plenty of it left — but it will not get extracted…
Oh and…. Attention DelusiSTANIS – your 3 days of fun are now… over… I have my spear sharpened and in hand and am kicking through this pile of comments looking for action ….
I believe the drop in population corresponded with the little ice age. Part of the problem was that crops failed in cold weather.
Big deforestation in North and South America since the invasion of those continents by so called settlers in the “new” undiscovered lands.
http://www.saveamericasforests.org/pages/educationrtfacts.htm
Less than 4% or under 40 million acres of America’s original forests remain in existence. According to the World Resources Institute, less than 1% of “Frontier Forests”–large, contiguous virgin forests with all the species intact–still exist in the lower 48 states.
Of the original 1.04 billion acres of virgin forest in the U.S., over 96% has been cut down.
Most of these last original forests are found on National Forest land and other public lands.
Most of these remaining public forests have no legal protection from clearcut logging.
America’s natural forests were once filled with magnificent trees, up to 400 feet tall—as high as a forty-story building.
America’s forests used to contain millions trees from 500 to over 2000 years old.
The U.S. Forest Service continues to log hundreds of thousands of acres of forests per year, including virgin forests
What Corporations replanted are plantations of one species of commercial fast growing genetically engineered variety. More like a lawn of grass!
South America
Last of the Amazon
In the time it takes to read this article, an area of Brazil’s rain forest larger than 200 football fields will have been destroyed. The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards. In the past three decades, hundreds of people have died in land wars; countless others endure fear and uncertainty, their lives threatened by those who profit from the theft of timber and land.
In this Wild West frontier of guns, chain saws, and bulldozers, government agents are often corrupt and ineffective—or ill-equipped and outmatched. Now, industrial-scale soybean producers are joining loggers and cattle ranchers in the land grab, speeding up destruction and further fragmenting the great Brazilian wilderness.
During the past 40 years, close to 20 percent of the Amazon rain forest has been cut down—more than in all the previous 450 years since European colonization began. The percentage could well be far higher; the figure fails to account for selective logging, which causes significant damage but is less easily observable than clear-cuts. Scientists fear that an additional 20 percent of the trees will be lost over the next two decades. If that happens, the forest’s ecology will begin to unravel. Intact, the Amazon produces half its own rainfall through the moisture it releases into the atmosphere. Eliminate enough of that rain through clearing, and the remaining trees dry out and die. When desiccation is worsened by global warming, severe droughts raise the specter of wildfires that could ravage the forest. Such a drought afflicted the Amazon in 2005, reducing river levels as much as 40 feet (12 meters) and stranding hundreds of communities. Meanwhile, because trees are wantonly burned to create open land in the frontier states of Pará, Mato Grosso, Acre, and Rondônia, Brazil has become one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases. The danger signs are undeniable.
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/last-of-amazon/
History repeating itself….faster…..
So, we are no better in managing our environment than Medieval folks…
Progress?
Just watch what 7.4 billion people do to the remaining forests when the power goes off….
They’ll cut nearby forests to the last tree… then I could imagine they would move … and repeat… of course moving is difficult…. because eventually you move to locations where you cannot produce food…
There are a lot of forests where I am from in northern Canada…. but you have a 12 week growing season at best….
like the nutters who say that city dwellers can just move out of cities to cultivate surrounding land to grow food.
exactly what happens when they meet other city dwellers from other cities doing the same thing is somehow never mentioned
I bet they saw that on a tee vee series….
I was at my brothers last year – they have a tee vee!!!! — and I saw something in passing — these nicely dressed people were living in the city post some sort of apocalypse… it looked like a wonderful adventure…. I assume they got food from somewhere….
I didn’t stick around to find out where….
No doubt this sort of rubbish is being pumped out on purpose — it calms the sheeple — see — collapse isn’t so bad — it’s an adventure!!! It’s fun!!! We should look forward to collapse.
Matrix 101
I’m amazed your bro didn’t make you face the wall while his tv was on!!
Actually…. American Idol came up next…. I was sent to my room because otherwise I will just sit there muttering who stupid it is…
I take great joy in recanting this story over and over … because my brother despises boy bands…
A friend dropped by our place in Bali once with a music guy — he knows Simon Cowell and was saying how others in industry take the piss of him because he was one of the originators of the boy band phenomenon ….
Anyway the punch line is that America Idol is essentially putting on the teevee the audition process for boy bands… sure some of them can sing — but singers are a dime a dozen …. they cannot write and most of them cannot play an instrument…
And like Menudo and other boy bands… most American Idol winners quickly fade off into the sunset… because they are nothing more than glorified karaoke singers….
Neil Young would of course never win American Idol…. 🙂
Euan Mearns tells us that we are cutting down more and more of our forests, worldwide. I imagine the push toward “renewable” energy is pushing this trend along.
Vince,
Lots to chew on here. And though I’ve been protesting not just the clearing but also the monoculture replacement of forests, I’m stumped for an answer to monoculture (and other inappropriate reforestation) I hear you can’t replace ecology you destroy. But some people have a much better way of replacing deforested areas than others. And I never hear about what indigenous people would do, or do in fact do.
It’s often said that when you conserve in one sphere, you only allow more consumption in another. It’s like walking in quicksand. But reforestation, good or bad, is one thing you can measure. It’s also, *theoretically*, an absolute good to reforest. More rain. More cooling. Less paving and heat reflection. I imagine you can measure the growth of reforestation relative to deforestation. But biodiversity is not assured.
This is my take….most of the over 40 age crowd will die off rather quickly…..not long ago a person was considered old by then and without BAU…forgetaboutit ….just won’t able to cope. Those in their prime years will be culled out too because their skill set is pushing buttons, watching a screen and expecting to buy something. So the first harsh winter most will simply freeze to death. Of course, the young will not be cared for and as years ago, one out of ten will survive to Adulthood.
No problem….nature cares not…as long as the task gets done.
Dear Artleads,
it seems, that it was the lack of the energy that drove the American occupation. The population of Europe was already past its energy limit of wood and food which caused its implosion.
Now, there are no new worlds to be occupied, so we will certainly face a big population deterioration and decline. Despite the continuing population rise, the deterioration is already going on, the populations are getting older, birth rates are decreasing. The population decline can not be stopped.
“I would need some serious bulk food intact to keep going.”
For sure. 2000 calories per day is for sitting at a desk. More like 3500 per day for doing manual labour. So, whatever estimates you have for needed land, double it for actually doing work and double it again to pad against bad years.
Matthew, about the amount of land to cultivate….more important is the approach than the size of the plot…Peter Bane, author of Garden Farming, seems one person can successfully tend about one to two acres in a Permaculture design setting.
Intensive, thoughtful integration of plant, animal and household in zones (with house being # 1 zone) has proven. I agree that more active folks can not sustain only on fruits and veggies….
The link to the book
http://permaculturehandbook.com
Keep up the good work!
Guys like this will thank you for getting the garden ready
http://www.hopenothate.org.uk//blog/images/2112_2458.jpg
Take a look at this piece of work…. he’ll be looking for organic vegetables too…
http://media2.fdncms.com/sfweekly/imager/henry-rollins-top-5-douchiest-tough-guy-r/u/big/2841688/rollinssoa.jpg
You have a wicked, morbid imagination, Fast Eddie. I agree with you, most of us will perish regardless. Hopefully, we don’t blow the planet to pieces with nukes in the process.
BTW, I have a pack of mean nasty curries to take care of those two!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gIu2zUBnCgg
Say hello to my little friend!
I have a Labrador that will lick the thugs to death.
I would say this pack must consume a lot of meat. They are usually killed before the real famine starts, as there is not enouh meat to feed them…
How drunk was Henry when he got that tattoo?
Your great adventure will soon begin — I am excited for you!
So am I….just a Boy and His Dog the year 2024…enjoy the movie
This is what you have in mind…right?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtxTJh0nFU
More along the lines of The Road – meets Apocalypse Now….
I am waiting to see who goes with a liquid fueled nuclear reactor first. I guess China.
Existing nuclear uses enriched uranium clad in metal 3/4in by 2in. These in turn are placed in metal tubes about ten feet long and called a fuel rod.
In a reactor several elements are produced by fission. One being Xenon gas. After about one percent of the fuel is burned the Xenon pressure builds up to the point where it will rupture the metal cladding. So, the fuel rod is replace with new and 99% of the expensive not used fuel is throw away.
In a liquid fuel reactor the Xenon is collected and disposed of and the reactor continues until it burn 100% of the fuel. Leaving little nuclear waste. Additionally, zero pressure heat exchange fluids can be used so no big pressure vessel is needed, the most expensive part of a nuclear reactor.
Quick and cheap to build, supplying 24/7/365 energy at the GW level. I bet China has a fleet of 20 by 2030.
I highly recommend you read:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
“The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but…energy…”
it gets better from there!
Ed, MSR are certainly in the class of energy sources that are compact an relatively inexpensive. The fuel for them will last a few centuries, which is enough. I can’t imagine that energy will be much of a problem that far out.
Besides power satellite, which are coming along about as well as you could expect, there is one other I know about, StratoSolar. I know Ed Kelly who is the main guy behind that. He expects that PV from the stratosphere will cost around 3 cents a kWh for suntime power and around 5 cents per kWh for base load. The reason for the low storage cost is that a 20 km platform can use simple “mass on cables” as a storage mechanism.
Keith, I like the StratoSolar idea. It is lower cost and lower risk than SPS.
It’s certainly a lower startup cost, but where Ed think he can get the cost down to 5 cents, power satellites start at 3 cents and rapidly fall to 2 cents per kWh.
Assuming I made the right assumptions and didn’t make an error in the model.
Cheaper is definite the right direction to go. It is easy to miss important part of total costs, such as the need for new generation to pay taxes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3762477/Massive-wind-turbine-catches-fire-burns-hours-German-fire-fighters-don-t-ladders-long-tackle-100m-high-blaze.html
Wind turbines on fire !!
Red sky at night –
Wind turbines alight!
“Red sky at night –
Wind turbines alight!
A potato grows over my head”.
It seems a very nice haiku. 🙂
I know that wind farms buy fire insurance, and that loss by fire is one of the major perils affecting wind turbines. I hadn’t thought about wind turbines being too tall would be a problem. Wind turbines out in the ocean are likely hard to fight fires too–or perhaps no one cares if they simply burn. They file a claim against the insurance company. No one complains about the remaining burned structure.
if you talk about insurance and in a BAU lite world, then it is not possible at all for wind farms to exist because in BAU lite, it is just not possible to have insurance coverage ! You need many people buying insurance in order for insurance to work.
Therefore, it is just not possible for any renewables for work at all in BAU lite. This is very big nail in the coffin for anyone talking about BAU lite.
Oil tankers will not be put into sea for transporting fuel if there is no insurance coverage. Therefore, there will be no oil transported in the world. In other words, BAU lite cannot exist at all.
I never thought about insurance but I do know that without insurance, many projects, things or events does not happen because no one wants to do it without insurance coverage.
Forget about government assurances. in a BAU lite, government does not exist anymore. They are way too big for all countries in the world and they are the ones who used the surplus energy. Imagine a civilization where there are 100 people producing food and 50 priests (government worker’s). How long can this civilization last?
Insurance companies take in premiums and some time later pay out claims. In the meantime, they put the money in various kinds of investments–mostly bonds in the US; perhaps a mixture of stocks and bonds elsewhere. If we start running into a lot of defaults on bonds, this becomes a big problem for insurance companies. So even if you do have people buying insurance, defaults on bonds and falling prices of stocks are a big problem. Banks also have to be open, so that insurance companies and wind turbine companies can pay employees.
http://kxan.com/2016/08/30/solar-panels-catch-fire-on-roof-of-apple-offices-in-northwest-austin/
PV on fire! !
Sunrise is red but solar cells are still in BED & BURNING!
Self destructing solar cells?
What’s next, burning turbines? Oh yes! that too!
I can just see us trying to keep up with the self destruction of those “renewables” as we try to futilly (Dam “spell” check! I HATE English! it’s “spelling” is IRRATIONAL! That is how it SHOULD be spelled! ) to build enough to replace the electricity we now generate from oil, coal & natural gas.
Can those “renewables” produce fertilizer, medicine, plastic, paints, synthetic fibers, herbicides, smelt metal, power a earth moving machine, pave our roads, power a manufacturing plant etc etc etc?
Can they do more than keep a few LED’s lit? TEMPORARILY?
No they cannot.
This article points out that besides causing fires, the existence of solar PV makes fighting blazes more difficult.
http://www.lowellsun.com/todaysheadlines/ci_30061421/solar-panel-fires-concern-local-officials
Other links:
http://www.somersetlive.co.uk/shocking-video-as-solar-panels-catch-fire-and-blaze-rages-through-two-properties-in-taunton/story-29556636-detail/story.html
http://www.wcvb.com/news/solar-panels-catch-fire-on-boston-rooftop/36165360
I think that wind turbine fires are a whole lot more common than solar PV fires, though.
our only hope lies in the tenacity of bau continuing for many years to come sure their may be many changes such as nirp expanding. a cashless society, bail-ins and austerity for the vast majority. as an individual what can you do get out of debt own your house outright, become as self-sufficient with food and water as u can. stock up in at least two years supplies of canned food ,have a stash of precious metals hidden in your house beef up home security because crime will most certainly increase, learn alternative approaches to physical and mental health meditation/fasting and be truthful to your family and friends about the future.If bau does end then all bets are off and fast eddies’ end days scenario will certainly play out
BAU has already ended for many Greeks, Syrians and others. If everyone owned their home outright it seems like there would be much fewer loans as we have said before. No debt == no money. But I agree on the getting out of debt. For the ones with enuf income to pay off your home. It’s not a bad strategy for weathering a crisis. Maybe you can even rent it out, and live even cheaper elsewhere?
Greece still has electricity… police…. decent medical care …. government …. food ….
BAU has not ended for Greeks. They are still living relatively large.
Have a look around the world — there are billions who would swap places with a Greek.
“BAU has not ended for Greeks. They are still living relatively large.”
Wow, Greeks are still consuming about 50% more energy in oil equivalence per capita than Turks. A mere 10 percent drop in energy per capita, and people think the sky is falling.
Greece is still living on borrowed money, and thus borrowed time.
The rest of the EU cannot kick the prop away from Greece for fear of bringing the whole EU house down, so the Greeks are getting on with their lives, convinced that the problem has gone away—it hasn’t.
this might help to explain what’s wrong,
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2015/07/29/and-you-thought-greece-had-a-problem/comment-page-1/
and why it’s more than just a Greek problem
Or to put it another way, Greeks are still consuming about seven times as much energy per capita as they did in 1960 (although the chart ends at 2014 so hard to tell how much further they have fallen):
https://www.google.ca/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&idim=country:GRC:TUR:CYP&hl=en&dl=en#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:GRC:TUR:CYP&ifdim=region&tstart=-294080400000&tend=1409986800000&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false
Some people tell me that there are quite a few people in Greece who are “falling between the cracks” of the system, but it is not making the news.
BAU is an agricultural society where 90% of the inhabitants labor in the fields for their daily calories.
The Industrial Revolution was just a short blip which is now fading away. Then we return to thatch & wattle cottages, dusk to dawn physical labor, gruel 2 times a day if you are lucky, and a ruling feudal strong-man who has an eye for your daughter.
If we are lucky, this is the result. The hunter-gatherer era lasted far longer than early farming, and the people living in the h-g era were far taller and healthier. Farming was just a workaround, when population had risen too high for resources.
“The hunter-gatherer era lasted far longer than early farming, and the people living in the h-g era were far taller and healthier. ”
This was true for the earliest agriculturalists, who had no nutrition science and relied on half-baked garden agriculture with only half-domesticated plants.
We’ve since learned a considerable amount about how to maintain good human health (don’t eat just one thing for every meal every day), how to grow food (over the centuries, different cultures in isolation developed hundreds of techniques for increasing yields that require no fossil fuels; in the modern era, we can pick and choose the very best from all of recorded history), and we’ve developed thousands of crop varieties that increase the yield per acre and yield per person astronomically above the earliest strains of staple crops.
Not all technology runs on electricity or fossil fuels.
Dear wysinwyg;
So, you save the seed from your garden? If you don’t, ST Heck U.
Its all well and good to claim some silly thing based on some permaculture theory, but if you cannot raise your crops from the seed you saved from the previous year (and I mean the personal YOU) you might as well be talking about cold fusion, or ghosts.
Get Real,
Pintada
“We’ve since learned a considerable amount …”
The big thing will be maintaining and transmitting that information without BAU. How many people ten generations from now will know those things?
“I am sure that double or triple digging adds to erosion problems, and shortens the lifetime of the soil, in some sense. See David Monetogmery’s book, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.”
But biointensive minifarming grows plants very close together. I had assumed that the resulting tangled root systems would slow erosion? Will see if I can find a writeup on Montgomery online. Living far enough outside the city, I don’t get to the library, and I can’t afford to buy books. (I’m starting to worry that, without the Internet, isolated folk like me will know less than nothing!)
“The world is made for no-till. That is what Hunter-Gathering was based on.”
Well, that’s what aesthetic intuition tells me. And recently it’s been saying that if we had sharp, strong picks of 3′ length to bore holes into the land, the resulting aeration would be welcome. Don Steward might have had a different version of this in mind, based on much study and reading.
“At a minimum, you need humanure to bring back the squash nutrients. You really need humnaure from squash-eating people.”
Yes. Throwing anything organic away makes no sense. Every five years, someone comes to empty or septic tank. A total waste, but there is no village septic system that will turn the sewerage into soil. I spent bucks to ship my grandfather’s commode to where I live, quietly prepared to put it to use one day. Make my own humanure compost.
“This is a problem related to our use of concentrations. We grow monocultures of squash, but it is very difficult to get the necessary nutrients back to the squash. Squash-loving insects start growing without limit after a few years, unless a lot of insecticide is used. They soon evolve to become immune to that insecticide, leading to the need to new, better insecticides.”
None of this applies to Jeavons. His group went so far as to hire soil experts to figure out why, with almost total recycling of what is consumed, the figures didn’t add up to 100%. Finally, they figured out that what was missing were the carcasses of the food consumers themselves, and that were their remains to be contributed to the mix of soil nutrients, all would be well.
And as to poor soil, I’m sure they’ve had to deal with that. Same with drought conditions. They participated in a project in S. Africa which suffered from dry weather. The solution was to dig down four feet and throw mattresses, old shoes, and anything which could absorb and hold moisture. This just before the short rainy season. I believe the excavated dirt (or whatever) was replaced on top. They reported success in growing food there.
A technique known as Hugekulture (sp) can do something similar. Digging down and throwing carboniferous (word) material in the hole The material breaks down into soil with time, even large tree trunks. Different time scales and levels of success depending on geography, I’m sure.
As to growing food on window sills. If you can grow food in pots, as is universally done, you can grow food on window sills.
One of the big issues that David Montgomery talks about is the fact that many of the minerals that we need to consume are obtained by erosion of the rocks below the soil and subsoil. How quickly this erosion takes place varies, but a typical rate is 1 inch per 1000 years. There are a lot of techniques that seem to help the size of crops today, but over the long term lead to some loss of topsoil–maybe one inch in 100 years. This is a lot faster than the rocks typically erode. So the technique we develop works for a while, until it depletes top soil.
Irrigation is another big problem, if it does not come from rivers overflowing their banks and carrying silt along. If irrigation comes from well water, it typically leads to the deposit of harmful minerals in the soil.
Rubbish.
Crop yields increased in lock-step with fossil fuel (green revolution) :
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xvXFI0JCiWI/TdUfddo8LTI/AAAAAAAAPUY/0BDn-eKJYRo/s1600/corn.jpg
http://www.ecifm.rdg.ac.uk/postwa12.gif
http://www.agbioforum.org/v2n1/v2n1a10-f01.gif
Wow!
Even worse than I thought….. and all this even needs fossil fuels to transport and distribute all the fertilizer… will not be done with horse carts… even if there still is the (magically working) fertilizer plant some dozens of miles away.
Another very dramatically and visible reason not to have kids now….
There can be zero doubt that total starvation will hit when BAU ends.
Throw in the spent fuel pond problem….
And all hope of survival on any level is crushed.
Now one can brood about this … once can lurch into denial….
Or one can accept this. Forget about permaculture tips… forget about stock piling…. forget about wasting time and energy on how to survive….
There is no surviving this.so enjoy whatever time is left
Repeat after me — there is no surviving this so enjoy whatever time is left.
Once you accept this — it will be as if a weight will be lifted from your shoulders… pretty much all worries you may have will disappear.
Weather permitting … the mountain bike goes onto the back of the truck … and I am again off to enjoy the bush and the ocean on the weekend. Solo trip this time.
Not a care in the world….
What’s to care about? What’s to worry about? I am already dead — but I feel great!
Dear Ms. Tverberg;
You must have thought about this before.
Thank you,
Pintada
This is a conclusion based on a number of academic studies:
First, growth in hunter gatherer populations was high, leading to population pressures for resources. There are a few articles on this. This is one I located now:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4743830/
There are some recent articles that I couldn’t find.
Agriculture, because of its organization (complexity) leads to greater food output per area farmed. Thus it permits population to continue to grow, once bottlenecks are reached. Population densities were much higher under agricultural settings. The increase in population during H-G could continue, with the addition of agriculture.
People in agricultural societies tend to be much shorter, due to poorer nutrition. People do not get an adequate range of nutrients. See Spenser Wells, “Pandora’s Seed”.
Farming has many adverse impacts on the soil. See David Montgomery, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.” Also, some Oil Drum posts I would have to look for. Montgomery contends that decreasing soil quality (erosion, loss of fertility, added salt, etc.) is a major contributor to collapses of civilizations. I see this as closely related to rising population / resources.
“People in agricultural societies tend to be much shorter, due to poorer nutrition. People do not get an adequate range of nutrients. See Spenser Wells, “Pandora’s Seed”.”
This depends on your status. They made some excavations around the ruins of the Hamar Cathedral, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Ruins_in_Hamar, and they found that the closer to the church you vere buried, the taller you were.
There are some indications that in US presidential elections, the taller candidate tends to win. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232274709_Tall_claims_Sense_and_nonsense_about_the_importance_of_height_of_US_presidents
When there is not enough to go around, some people fare better than others. North Koreans tend to be very short, now a days.
.
Fast Eddy Enterprises (non-used car division) …. recently launched a new educational service http://www.huntergatherercourses.com
This course will teach the serious doomer how to live like a native …. completely off the land… by the end of the 1 month course you will be able to survive in a variety of absolutely remote locations without a single BAU accoutrement
Doomer parents — we have summer camps…. give your kids a fighting chance!
Anyone want to bet that Chris Martenson copies this idea onto his website….
You are incorrect.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you/
You can be a little more optimistic, I think. Quality of life has been considerably better than what you describe for much of human history and prehistory, and that’s neglecting the notion that we might have actually, ya know, learned a few things since the start of the industrial revolution that could help us increase agricultural output per person even without the use of fossil fuels. Urbanization in Europe started (and feudalism declined) well before the industrial revolution — like a few hundred years before.
The biggest problem will be massive deforestation caused by the switch from fossil fuels to wood and charcoal for heat and cooking.
” Quality of life has been considerably better than what you describe for much of human history and prehistory, and that’s neglecting the notion that we might have actually, ya know, learned a few things since the start of the industrial revolution that could help us increase agricultural output per person even without the use of fossil fuels. Urbanization in Europe started (and feudalism declined) well before the industrial revolution — like a few hundred years before.”
Urban quality of life for the few and servitude for the many? Still, there were roads and rooms and utensils for a far larger population than in the middle ages? I wish someone would do a visual chart of that pre-FF window of time where there was quite a high level of civilization. I have to remember that there was a lot of wealth coming in from the Americas during this window, and that most of that–perhaps not knowledge or infrastructure so much–has been squandered.
“Urban quality of life for the few and servitude for the many? ”
No, I don’t think that’s a very good model of the situation. Not all those in cities had high quality of life, and not all those outside of cities had low quality of life. Being materially poor is not the same as servitude. And servitude itself can come in many forms — slavery in ancient Greece was much different than our conception of slavery, with trusted slaves often left to their own devices to run the family farm in the country while the farm’s owners spent their time and energy on the polis.
We can highlight many different pre-fossil fuel “golden ages”. All of them had their own problems, and it’s perhaps too easy to romanticize those periods, but the people who lived in those societies found life to be worth living and often managed to achieve surprising levels of material wealth on a very limited basis of resources.
I think another problem is the close identification of material wealth and quality of life. I try to draw a distinction between standard of living and quality of life. Many of the happiest people on earth are the most materially poor, and many of the most spiritually wealthy intentionally eschew material wealth. This is an ideological disease that we will have to overcome if we want to minimize the harm that occurs over the process of de-industrialization.
Not exactly what you’re wishing for- but this chart is useful when contemplating populations over time.
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php
Human populations in their original hunter/gatherer state numbered a couple of million individuals. Depending where you measure from (the emergence of the genus homo, or the species homo sapiens) those numbers fluctuated in that low range for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
The agricultural revolution/civilization enabled growth up to the 600-900 million range (lets call it 750 million give or take). That’s a pretty phenomenal explosion.
So non-fossil-fuel civilization allowed the addition of 750 million human souls to our planet, give or take, over the course of 10,000 years.
Then fossil fuel civilization came along and added about 6.5 BILLION souls in just 250 years.
I think this is where most of us begin to arrive at our less-than-optimistic conclusions. We only ever supported 10% of our current population with non-FF infrastructure. Everything above that 10%, which has occurred in just 250 years, is supported by industrial civilization. All of our learning, technological advances, plant gene variety, and all of that happened in a society reaping the benefits of fossil fuel energy.
When fossil fuel civilization ends, it seems to me that a reversion to 750 million would be a most optimistic outcome. This assumes the transition is mostly peaceful and orderly, and addresses inconvenient things like spent fuel ponds and nuclear warheads…
“Then fossil fuel civilization came along and added about 6.5 BILLION souls in just 250 years.”
This is a terrible oversimplification. Fossil fuels were not widely used in agriculture until the 20th century.
The huge bump in your data from 1800 to 1850? Not the result of fossil fuels! As I mention above, there are many agricultural technologies that increase yield per acre and yield per person that do NOT require fossil fuels at all.
While I haven’t actually demonstrated that it’s possible to feed the world’s current population without fossil fuels, nor does your analysis show the opposite. Will we need to increase the acreage that is used for food production? Of course, but we have lots of fertile and unused potential farmland to expand into! Most of the world’s population will need to stop doing what they’re doing and attend to food production instead, but without an electrical grid, most of their current jobs won’t exist anyway.
This is still an open question as far as I’m concerned.
green revolution
noun
noun: green revolution; plural noun: green revolutions
a large increase in crop production in developing countries achieved by the use of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yield crop varieties.
The Green Revolution refers to a set of research and development of technology transfer initiatives occurring between the 1930s and the late 1960s (with prequels in the work of the agrarian geneticist Nazareno Strampelli in the 1920s and 1930s), that increased agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s.[1] The initiatives resulted in the adoption of new technologies, including:
…new, high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereals, especially dwarf wheats and rices, in association with chemical fertilizers and agro-chemicals, and with controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and new methods of cultivation, including mechanization. All of these together were seen as a ‘package of practices’ to supersede ‘traditional’ technology and to be adopted as a whole.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Irrigation = fossil fuels
Mechanization = fossil fuels
Pesticides/ Fertilizers = fossil fuels
“When fossil fuel civilization ends, it seems to me that a reversion to 750 million would be a most optimistic outcome.”
This only makes sense if you assume:
-We cannot increase manpower devoted to farming above 18th century levels
-We cannot increase acreage devoted to farming above 18th century levels
-We have not found any way to increase yield per acre or per person without using fossil fuels
-We cannot find any new techniques that increase yield per acre or per person without using fossil fuels
-We have not developed new strains of plant that increase yield per acre or yield per person without fossil fuels
All these assumptions are demonstrably false.
Soil that is farmed using petro-chemical inputs — will support no crop once the outputs are stopped – without years of intensive rejuvenation involving organic inputs.
Organic inputs will be hard to come by considering nothing can be grown – and most if not all animals are killed and eaten.
Less than 1% of all farmland globally is farmed organically.
Get ready to starve.
https://agenda.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/agriculture3.png (note – most organic land in Australia is rubbish and supports sheep only)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/08/which-countries-have-the-most-organic-agricultural-land/
Organic uses irrigation. It also uses special fertilizers and sprays that are deemed “organic,” but are certainly transported using fossil fuels, and use fossil fuels at many places in the supply chains. For example, the processing machines use fossil fuels, and the containers are made using fossil fuels.
Yep — so we are looking at a fraction of a percent of all food being produced without BAU inputs…
There is also the issue of seeds… many seeds used by most organic farmers cannot be harvested from vegetables and saved for future planting… they are hybrids…. one-hit wonders….
Some hybrids do work as seeds, I understand. They may not reproduce “true,” but what they reproduce is still useful. Some are sterile.
I have to respectfully disagree. I think you’re underestimating the extent to which energy use, population, and agriculture are intertwined. Gail was addressing this issue as early as 2012: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/08/29/the-long-term-tie-between-energy-supply-population-and-the-economy/
A thorough treatment of the direct link between energy, fuels, and population carrying capacity was published in Energy Bulletin in 2009: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-interrelationship-between-population-growth-and-energy-resources
Regarding your counter-arguments:
“This only makes sense if you assume:
-We cannot increase manpower devoted to farming above 18th century levels”
In the 18th century, the US labor force consisted of 90% farmers and today they make up 2%. So in the US, you’d need to transition about 280 million more people (out of 318 million) to agricultural production- leaving only about 38 million people to do everything else necessary to facilitate this radical transformation of society. Our new farmers would be people with no agricultural skills and no physical conditioning for manual labor. The obesity rate is 35%, so about 100 million of those 280 million people wouldn’t make it a week working the fields. I fail to understand how this transition is feasible.
“-We cannot increase acreage devoted to farming above 18th century levels”
By the mid 1800s total US farmland was about 300 million acres for a population of 25 million or so, or about 12 acres per person. Today there are less than 950 million acres of farmland for 300 million people, or just over 3 acres per person. To reach the 1800s rate for current population, we’d need to quadruple the agricultural acres in the US to about 3.8 billion acres. There are only 2.3 billion acres of land area in the US, and that includes Alaska. We appear to be about 1.5 billion acres short.
“-We have not found any way to increase yield per acre or per person without using fossil fuels”
Okay, so maybe amidst all of this turmoil we somehow manage to maintain order and structure to be able to apply superior techniques to agriculture at large scale. Right now the entire system- all of our efficiencies and techniques, are built on fossil fuel infrastructure. From irrigation, to fertilizer, to transportation. Is it reasonable to believe that our 280 million partly obese, mostly inept, entirely novice farm workforce will be able to apply some superior knowledge about farming to outproduce the farmers of 250 years ago? Can we imagine that under these conditions, we are even able to approach the yields seen by those hardy men and women who grew up their entire lives, for generations, learning the craft and trade of agriculture? Again, I just can’t see it.
“-We cannot find any new techniques that increase yield per acre or per person without using fossil fuels”
This is really just a rewording of the previous point.
“-We have not developed new strains of plant that increase yield per acre or yield per person without fossil fuels”
Perhaps our new genetically mutated crops do have some inherent increase in yield independent of fossil fuels: but the most productive adjustments by far have been to adapt the crops to better fit an industrial farming model. For example, we create a variety of corn that withstands roundup so that you can fly airplanes over the field and spray chemicals over it, eliminating competition with weeds. I imagine the increased yield purely from engineering superior crops, independent of industrial intervention, is probably minimal. I cannot imagine that human intervention in the genes of crops have created a product so superior that it can overcome the issues of inadequate skilled labor, technique, and land area to support the current population.
All of this just to say what all of us on OFW understand: we’re not all going to make it. The math just doesn’t work. We’re in overshoot, and the only way this ends is with a massive reduction in human population.
Froggman,
Another time chart.
http://alternativeenergy.procon.org/view.timeline.php?timelineID=000015
So far, I haven’t come across much about how population might have developed so rapidly in the early 19th century without the use of FF. Not that I doubt that this was the case. I’m terrible at research, but happy enough to pick up a fact or two from the blogosphere.
Thanks for the link to the timeline for alternative energy sources.
It was not until I actually saw a historic wind mill in Netherlands that I realized that the windmills of that era were much more sophisticated than those of today. A family lived inside the windmills, and was charged with adjusting the windmill so it would produce no more than the desired amount of wind energy. The blades were open lattices that themselves would catch little wind energy. It was only when coverings were put over the blades that they pumped significantly. The families living inside took the coverings off as needed, to regulate the amount of wind energy produced. Once the water had been pumped from one area to another sufficiently, the pumping acton was stopped. There was also a way that families communicated with other families in the area regarding energy needs, and when it was time to stop pumping.
Wysinwyg
Per Frogmans post: is there a dieoff involved in your forecast?
without the use of FF FOR GROWING FOOD
Dear whatyouseeisnotwhatyouget;
How much wheat have you grown? Do you grow your own wheat, grind it into bread, save the seed and grow your own wheat the next year? I know your answers: 0 and no
When you have done so, come back and then we can talk.
Theory is not reality,
Pintada
Good points!
Have a look at St. Matthew island’s reindeer. Google and read it. It is a must for those who are interested in carrying capacitiy
https://www.amazon.com/How-Grow-More-Vegetables-Eighth/dp/160774189X
I’m not going to argue with anyone. Believe this or don’t. I know John Jeavons, the inventor of the evolved discipline of biointensive minifarming. And although I don’t follow statistics much, I’m pretty sure that he offers a way to grow more than enough food for everyone, using his method, and even without much reliance on what is called “agricultural land.” His is an urban and suburban project.
http://www.johnjeavons.info/
Any numbers?
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/michael-guerra-and-permaculture-food-growing-10-years
75-250kg vegetables from 75m2, with a minimum of 750L manure added.
Nice article, DJ. I hate to read, so I’m not going to weed through all the online links I posted for Ecology Action. But I tried calling them today to get some numbers–in my mind it was something like 100 (1,000?) square feet to feed a family of four. Either amount would seem miraculous. Obviously, I don’t practice this method. Too wayward.
But no one picked up the phone and I left no message. I may try again.
” 100 (1,000?) square feet to feed a family of four.”
100, I don’t think so. I ran this calculation about 40 years ago. Got 32 square meter per person for a space farm. 4 people would take about 1400 square feet. But that was optimal growing conditions in a space farm, no bugs, no bad weather.
“4 people would take about 1400 square feet. But that was optimal growing conditions in a space farm, no bugs, no bad weather.”
I don’t have the books and statistics at hand. What I know is that Jeavons’ people are very scientific, with a long history of research predating permaculture. Double (or even triple) digging, which they practice, is an unusual method that may loosen and aerate soil. They add lots of organic stuff, and test the soil to see what it can use. I saw it at work, and had considerable success myself with very short lived and limited deployment. Too much work to suit me, and I prefer no till (to use a glossy term). I’m not trying to be self-sufficient in food. Just to have fun and be a tad resilient. If civilization can’t adapt to keep feeding me, then that’s the end of the tale.
We can compute this another way. A food calorie is 4.184 kj or kw-s
If you use 2000 C per day, then the load is ~83 C/hr, or ~100 watts. Sunlight comes down at ~1 kW/m^2 so 1/10th of a square meter would be enough to keep a person fed if the sun shown all the time and everything was 100% efficient. Night and cosign losses multiply this up by a factor of ~5 so now we are at half a square meter. Then comes the killer, photosynthetic average efficiency is around 1%, corn or sugar cane in the middle of the growing season might hit 3%, but the overall 1% is a fairly good number. That takes you up to 50 square meters, or 200 for 4 people. It would take a lot less area if people could eat electricity because PV is about 20 times as good at capturing energy as plants.
However, PV doesn’t self replicated like plants do.
Interesting calculation. Of course, to actually produce and deliver 2000 calories per day, there is some loss of food “spoilage”–really to other species. This is part of the cycle too. And somehow fertility must be maintained, and loss of topsoil battled.
Of course, the lack of replicating ability for PV makes it a fairly short-lasting type of potential solution.
Double till is a no-go under many circumstances. Our soil is at best a few inches deep, to begin with. It is also clay. You need to start with something better.
I am sure that double or triple digging adds to erosion problems, and shortens the lifetime of the soil, in some sense. See David Monetogmery’s book, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.”
The world is made for no-till. That is what Hunter-Gathering was based on. With food production widely distributed, it is much easier to get the right nutrients spread back, than it is if a person is, for example, growing a field of squash. At a minimum, you need humanure to bring back the squash nutrients. You really need humnaure from squash-eating people. This is a problem related to our use of concentrations. We grow monocultures of squash, but it is very difficult to get the necessary nutrients back to the squash. Squash-loving insects start growing without limit after a few years, unless a lot of insecticide is used. They soon evolve to become immune to that insecticide, leading to the need to new, better insecticides.
AL & HKH,
1000 ft2 is 93 m2 and close enough to 75 m2.
Until proved otherwise (I don’t know this stuff) I consider Guerras 250 kg produce from 75 m2 as a world record claim.
Averaging the first vegetable calorie table I found, I got 880 kcal/kg vegetables.
250*880/2500/365=0.24, they could support a quarter male adult from 75m2!
I think it is obvious they have maximized their output for sport, they talk about techniques for this, perhaps even “cheated” as in chosing vegetables that give a lot of kg per m2, or even cheated as in lied.
Their method would probably not scale well to much larger area considering just having two kids (and ONE job) dropped the output by 70%.
And both Jeavons and Guerra and whoever is a name in this area are experts, not something the average uninterested idiot can aspire to.
I still consider John Seymours 5 acres for a large family much much closer to the what is required than the roof of an apartment building.
AL & HKH,
1000 ft2 is 93 m2 and close enough to 75 m2.
Until proved otherwise (I don’t know this stuff) I consider Guerras 250 kg produce from 75 m2 as a world record claim.
Averaging the first vegetable calorie table I found, I got 880 kcal/kg vegetables.
250*880/2500/365=0.24, they could support a quarter male adult from 75m2!
I think it is obvious they have maximized their output for sport, they talk about techniques for this, perhaps even ‘cheated’ as in chosing vegetables that give a lot of kg per m2, or even cheated as in lied.
Their method would probably not scale well to much larger area considering just having two kids (and ONE job) dropped the output by 70%.
And both Jeavons and Guerra and whoever is a name in this area are experts, not something the average uninterested idiot can aspire to.
I still consider John Seymours 5 acres for a large family much much closer to the what is required than the roof of an apartment building.
I have gotten an insane amount of squash this year. From 2-3 m2 and next to no effort. 50 kg is a conservative estimate, largest I has weighed was 1.8.
Lets round it to 100 kg.
15000 kcal. 6 days of food …
I wonder how many years this process could be repeated, without badly depleting the soil of necessary nutrients. Also, the annual digging up of soil encourages erosion.
Even crop rotation and animal manure don’t necessarily fix these problems.
I presume you were not watering this squash at all. That is another issue.
‘15000 kcal. 6 days of food’
Futility defined….
I made similar stark realizations… and I now grow food only because I like growing food.
Gail,
If you mean the Guerras, it is possible both their soil and will power eroded, that could help explain their 70% drop in output.
Of course I watered my squash, can’t depend on my brother in law, I just wanted to illustrate that kg raw food is a fuzzy measure.
DJ et al,
In my own experience I agree the 5 acres per family is probably a goal for most mere mortals to aspire to.
I myself farm 5 acres for a family of 5. We don’t produce all of our food but if we were forced to we could certainly make a good run at it. We’re 100% organic but are woefully dependent on fossil fuels.
Until one tries doing it himself, one doesn’t fully comprehend how critical FF are to the process. I know I didn’t. From running around town in a car to pick up supplies, transporting animals and feed by truck, hauling “farm stuff” around with a tractor or tilling, and of course importing things we don’t grow ourselves (like grains for the pigs) which are grown with FF and transported via freight.
We’ve been at it for about 4 years and have the perfect setup in the perfect place, good health, and strong hands. If you took FF away we MIGHT be able to feed ourselves- but it would be exponentially more difficult and with one twist of bad luck (draught, illness, etc) we’d be toast. I don’t see how people less fortunate than us in terms of location, resources, or health would stand a chance.
You can probably grow squash no till, just a minimal hole where you put the plant or seed (depending on climate).
If you really like squash you could use a couple sq m each year per person and rotate. A four person family with 1000 sq m would probably not need to use the exact same spot for a 100 years.
But squash doesn’t add a meaningful amount of calories.
My recollection is that around the time of the Great Irish Famine, two acres and a pig made a family self-sufficient, with potatoes providing most of the calories. I did a brief search and the written history tends to suggest that that precise arrangement was uncommon.
It is my recollection that pigs can fly…. I am sure I saw one yesterday doing exactly that…
I should have taken a video so I could prove it.
Reference for the 2 acres comment please.
Kampuchea serves as a model… Year Zero.
Let’s take a peak:
https://notevenpast.org/wp-content/uploads/imagecache/lg_/Screen%20shot%202012-06-28%20at%203.34.51%20PM.png
Where’s Scott Nearing and Toby Hemmingway when you need them!
FA, there has been an earthquake in New Zealand.
All good?.
FA non, Fast Eddy.
Speaking as a New Zealander… two words…non event
All good – my wife felt it … I slept through…. thanks for asking.
the kinda details we can do without 🙂
🙂
FE thought this was the big one and has gone to alert level Defcon1.
Hiding out…
http://shippingcontainerhomesideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/living-in-a-shipping-container-australia.jpg
In the current economic system, “renewables” have an undeniable scaling problem.
A very tedious [monk] compilation work was done in Europe from Sept 1st 2010 to march 28th 2011 of adding up all wind power input to the grid across the WHOLE of Europe.
For a total of 65 000 MW of NOMINAL installed capcity, this chart shows week by week what was delivered in reality:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B46lGJ1Hn8N2dFZHc3hSX0pHejA/view?usp=sharing
For all practical purpose, there isn’t any real Europe wide wind power compensation possible i.e. — When the wind isn’t blowing enough in one part Europe, it’s not compensated by another windy area elsewhere. By and large, when you have an Atlantic depression zone, all of Europe gets the feed, but when you get an anticyclonic Atlantic, all you get is some residual feed in Gibraltar, Southern France… but that’s about it…
Recall that for every doubling of a turbine speed you get 2 cube of that in power output increase — meaning — 8 fold ***
Scaling up …. is indeed not possible….
Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top Google engineers
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/google-gives-up-on-green-tech-investment-initiative-rec/
The issue is not so much the fact that we can or not replace electricity with renewable sources: frankly speaking, we can. The economic activity will be lower, but you just need to look at Venezuela right now: even if the electric supply is a mess right now, there is still plenty of economical activity and people there is not dying of hunger or suffering from basic needs at all.
People and our systems just adapts, so if the electricity is cheaper at 10AM-6PM, then most the intense activity will happen at those hours (and frankly speaking, that’s already what’s happening anyway), whereas necessary night services will have to work their own battery systems (the hospitals around the world already have those, though). Of course nightlife, works and stuff are going to strongly reduce and be readjusted to day-light times, and shortcuts are expected as well, causing a mess from time at time.
The real issue here is not so much if we can replace, maybe not all, but a big share of our electricity today, we can even if it is imperfect. What we can’t easily replace is the energy intensive industries and transport who’re fully dependent of extremely high levels of energy that, let it be batteries, constancy, mere EROI and a few financial issues, we just can’t generate with renewable sources without expecting a massive shrinkage in our economies (and a whole economic reconstructionist global revolution which will kill anything dependent on globalism and long-distances travels) and with that loads of people dying who’re dependent from those surpluses to eat and thrive.
Supply-Chain Contagion Arrives – “Global Trade” Roiled, Cargo-Owners Panic In Wake Of Hanjin Bankruptcy
Supply chain.. . supply chain…. that is what I have been stressing all about. It can be a non-event or a black swan. Cracks are getting bigger and bigger.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-01/supply-chain-contagion-arrives-hanjin-bankruptcy-roils-global-trade-freezes-ships-ra
how the PVs, wind turbines, wave-power generator and all other renewals are going to get their parts if the supply chain breaks…. I wonder….. 😉
Saudis are starting to invest in camel caravans.
Hmmm…. a FW virgin…. I could teach you ,,,, or you could read through the archived articles…
Hi Gail,
I met you in 2014 at the Age of Limits Conference at Four-Quarters, I was providing audio.
Intermittent electricity:
“Few people have stopped to realize that intermittent electricity isn’t worth very much.”
Surely, in the future, if intermittent is all we have, it will likely look pretty good?
“Absent transformative technology breakthroughs, 100% renewable generation is not possible”.
Steve Kean, Kinder Morgan
Anybody believing this is living in a very short-term window, or in fairy land.
Renewables are the ONLY possibility we will have in the not-so-distant future.
This is like the statements that only industrial agriculture can feed the world.
Long-term, ONLY sustainable ag will feed us.
1 Grid issues:
Solar electricity production will likely be much more local/regional, with lower long-distance line losses.
Sections of the grid will be maintained as long as they are cost effective.
2 Operating reserves:
Where water power is available, it has seasonal and other fluctuations.
So we use it when the water is flowing.
When the wind is blowing, we will use it.
Where solar hot water or photovoltaic energy is available, we will use the bulk of it while the sun is brightly shining.
Batteries or other storage will give us a few lights at night.
3 Excess energy:
There simply won’t be much.
For times when there is a little extra, a pile of logs could be turned in to lumber, etc.
4 High cost of renewables:
Hydro and solar hot water have pretty reasonable costs right now.
PV IS expensive. Incremental improvements in materials, production and transportation will lower the costs a little, but
the cheap, low-hanging fruit has likely already been plucked.
At some point, animal traction power is going to start being cost effective.
Issue 5. The amount that electrical utilities are willing to pay for intermittent electricity is very low.
When the choice is high cost or no energy, decisions will be made.
Issue 6. When intermittent electricity is sold in competitive electricity markets (as it is in California, Texas, and Europe), it frequently leads to negative wholesale electricity prices.
Long-term, any concentrated energy will have a high value.
Issue 7. Other parts of the world are also having problems with intermittent electricity.
As your blog name says, we live on a Finite World.
We will live quite differently; more in tune with cycles of dark and light, the turning of the seasons, birth and death.
Issue 8, Subsidies:
A friend of mine has owned a local solar company for more than thirty years.
He is with you on cutting out all renewable energy subsidies.
He says solar can stand on its own two feet.
But it is only fair to at the same time to cut all fossil fuel subsidies.
Make solar and every other industry eliminate massive pollution and clean up after themselves.
“The situation is a little like adding a large number of drunk drivers, or of self-driving cars that don’t really work as planned, to a highway system.”
Soon we will have far fewer cars on the roads. Drunks will have a hard time getting behind the wheel of a car, and
we will live less tech-whiz-bang lives, without self-driving vehicles.
“we run the risk of bringing the whole system down.”
Gail T.
I see no risk, only certainty.
How can anybody imagine we can run the current system without massive extraction of non-existent fossil fuels?
Why not acknowledge reality now, and take reasonable steps to head in that direction?
I am confused.
In other posts you have made it clear that fossil fuels are headed toward being too expensive too extract.
What options are you proposing?
A good read:
http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture
Thanks and good health, Weogo
“At some point, animal traction power is going to start being cost effective.”
I suppose you get asked how 7 B people can coexist with large farm animals that have to be fed.
You’re talking about some level of a money economy. Centralized money–like anything–has too many moving parts for easy comprehension. Are we talking about BAU Lite–the same global system as now, but a bit powered down–or talking about a mostly human-muscle-powered economy that somehow manages to maintain enough order to tap alternative ways to power a few things–hospitals, communications, small crafts, etc.?
Solar panels and wind turbines are a subset of the fossil fuel economy. There is essentially only one aspect of the solar panel and wind turbine life-cycle that does not require fossil fuels, the actual capture of energy from the wind and sun and turning into electricity. And that is the only thing most folks consider. Fossil fuels are literally stored energy that can be instantly burned to produce heat. Solar panels and wind turbines are a completely different beast. They are energy capture devices which produce electricity. Solar panels and wind turbines cannot replace fossil fuels because they are two completely different things.
I have read very few blogs outside of this one that take into account all the externalities of solar and wind power. Here is a short list why I feel Gail is on the right track with solar and wind power: Extraction of raw materials to produce the panels and turbines – fossil fuels. Transportation of raw materials – fossil fuels. Forming raw materials into finished product – fossil fuels. Transporting them to their final location – fossil fuels. Feeding and educating the millions of people that it will take to research and develop and maintain them – fossil fuels. Maintaining the electric grid and other supporting infrastructure – fossil fuels. Production of all the cars, trucks and appliances (that will be powered by solar panels and wind turbines) – fossil fuels. The inverters and batteries (if used) will also need to be produced with fossil fuels.
It seems to me that to have the solar economy you have to have the fossil fuel economy as well. And a lot more fossil fuel consumption than we have now to support yet another layer on top of our virtual world. People forget how many layers of complexity we are building upon. Just think about going into the forest and making a pencil. Just a simple “disposable” pencil or Styrofoam cup. These things do not exist in nature. It takes a lot of energy (a lot) to power our virtual world that exists inside of the natural world. Folks today are born into a world where they think cell phones are natural things that will always exists. It is the wrong kind of thinking.
The combination of all these externalities leads me to believe that solar panels and wind turbines are a net energy loss. Nuclear is the only other fuel more energy dense than fossil fuels. That is the only way to continue to grow the economy. Without growth the economy will collapse. Even wood is more energy dense than solar panel power. If we cannot power modern society on wood we sure won’t be able to power it off solar panels.
Very clear explanation, Greg. I had just about gotten to this point of understanding, but you made it even more precise.
Well stated. Those now cheap solar installations may be cheap only because of the legacy oil fields that supply most of the world’s petroleum- a key resource in making the industrial machine hum along.
And petroleum is also critical in the economics of other energy source that we utilize- coal, nat gas, ethanol, and renewables.
Yes! I agree with every word of your comment Greg.
Are you advocating that we press on with developing nuclear as a possible way out of our current energy dilemma? Or do you think that would be futile?
I note that the problem is not understood correctly. Diminishing returns the system in its entirety leads us to an irreversible economic contraction.
I do not know that you can help increase nuclear power generation when electricity demand will decrease.
In my opinion, this strategy will be a source of future problems, not benefits.
Remember consumption data. Nuclear is as useless as “renewable”.
http://mazamascience.com/OilExport/output_es/Sources_BP_2016_consumption_mtoe_US_MZM_NONE__.png
Remember consumption data. Nuclear is as useless as “renewable”.
🙂
“I note that the problem is not understood correctly. Diminishing returns the system in its entirety leads us to an irreversible economic contraction.”
Given a target, engineers will noodle around to see how to get there. Sometimes they do this for 40 years.
What return numbers do you need to keep the system out of an irreversible economic contraction?
Please, explain better.
What return numbers you mean?
Anyway I fear that this problem is no longer a matter of engineers.
“Please, explain better.
What return numbers you mean?”
If we had free, unlimited, no carbon electricity, I think most people would agree it would kick BAU down the road for a 100 years or longer.
That seems unlikely, but there is an engineering method called “design to cost.” We can extend that to “design to EROEI” as well. But we need a target. Real world we can’t get zero cost or infinite EROEI (or zero payback time).
For analysis I have assumed certain numbers and worked toward them, off and on for over 40 years.
These numbers tend to be strongly related, but what target in cents per kWh do you think would get the human race out of the multiple problems we face? Can you put an acceptable number on EROEI? Or (almost the same thing) can anyone give an energy payback time that would work?
“Anyway I fear that this problem is no longer a matter of engineers.”
Have you asked any? If you did, what did they say?
We have some time before things fall apart. 10 years? 20? Before you say that’s not enough, read the history of the Manhattan project.
“What return numbers do you need to keep the system out of an irreversible economic contraction?”
Let’s say, energy consumption and real GDP must grow 2 percent per annum. How do we make people consume more energy, buy more goods and services?
Creating more energy supply does not increase demand. Lowering prices has a limited effect on demand – Venezuela had something like 20 cent a gallon gasoline for quite some time, but didn’t get 50% growth out of it. The trend towards more automation means lower prices and more savings, maybe more profits for the owners, but less jobs and less demand from workers.
Printing money and giving it to people – stimulus, universal income, whatever – is just taxation through inflation, I don’t know if it can create a sustained net growth in demand.
It depends on how much debt there is in the system, and why the system begins to contract. I’m guessing that if there is more debt in the system than collateral to support it, then the potential for collapse is there. All it takes, again, I’m guessing, is the arrival of a problem with a critical resource.
Hkeithhenson,
Well, I am not in disposition to give a response to his questions. But any primary source of energy should be capable of providing the equivalent to us to a barrel with a cost of, let’s say, 10$…20$? A barrel of oil is equivalent to 6,1178632 × 109 J or 1.700 Kilowatts – hours.
It is not necessary to forget that the economy works with two energetic completely different systems. And reconvertirla in electricity, he would carry a cost inasumible.
Nevertheless, after many years of studying and thinking about the question of the limits, I have the certainty of which nothing will be able to equalize the profitability of the fossil fuels. To try to equalize the costs that have provided the fossil fuels to us, with infrastructure complejas technological is a chimera. And the history has demonstrated it. In my opinion, a ” Energy Project Manhhatan ” would be useless and counter-productive for the nation that he it was undertaking, because with complete certainty it would be a failure.
As for the matter of increasing the nuclear power in the energetic mix, it is something that does not stop surprising me that he proposes in this blog. We approach a global recession, surely it will be definitive, the USA already came to his maximum energetic consumption and the prompt world will do it. Then, why to increase the future production with tremendous investments that will not return profitability to us? You are engineer? In my country there is a saying: “To a hammer everything looks like a nail”. An objective must be reasonable and rational. For example, achieve increased efficiency of the whole process, “from cradle to grave” is a challenge. And the economy towards smart investments and real return. Both are in my opinion, the best way to continue longer with BAU, therefore alive.
I am sorry not to have been of more help. We have very different ways of approaching the problem.
At a US cent per kWh, the BoO equivalent would be $17, two cents, which the model has in a few years would be $34/bbl. Where we really need hydrocarbons for aircraft and some other kinds of transport, we can make them from two cent power, including the capital charge, for $50/bbl.
Yes, I am an engineer. The function of engineers is to solve problems.
Right! Except in some ways, nuclear is much better than renewable. Because nuclear is non-intermittent, it is much more scalable without “taking out” the rest of the system. But it has limits, and indirectly contributes to growing carbon pollution as well.
I would rather see an all out push to develop nuclear power to its fullest potential rather than waste time, resources and energy on solar panels and wind turbines. If we are to have any extension of the good life nuclear is the only way forward.
However, I am not under any illusion of what we are doing as a society. Our entire economic system is based on infinite growth in a finite world. Even nuclear is finite. And all the resources outside of energy are even more so.
I have simply resolved myself to enjoy life to its fullest since we are now living at the highest peak of human intellectual achievement ever in history and likely ever in the future.
Why not… if it buys us 5 years …. great…
Or better still …. let’s just build thousands of coal-fired plants…. what’s a bit of smog when the alternative is starvation and death…
Whatever it takes…. if it gets us more time…. I am all for it.
++++++++
That’s the thing… people don’t think….
The amount of time until I die is rather short… so I will only address this:
‘Surely, in the future, if intermittent is all we have, it will likely look pretty good?’
Fossil fuels are required to make solar and wind power systems. They cannot exist if fossil fuels are not available.
We will never only have intermittent energy. It is not possible.
A few home systems may last for a few years–until something breaks and cannot be replaced. But there will be the problem that these systems are difficult to pick up and move, if it becomes clear that moving would be in the person’s best interest.
Hmmmmm…. big drop off in auto sales….
https://mishtalk.com/2016/09/01/auto-slide-or-plateau/
Corporate profits in decline for nearly 2 years…. auto sales now sliding….
It feels like a snowball gathering momentum…
“Cash for Clunkers II”
Update on the Hubbs Memorial Flywheel at (formerly) Stone Mountain:
The currently modeled configuration (the one I’m going to go to presentation with) is 1km long and 760m across and shaped roughly like a top with dumbbell-like spherical protrusions on each end. These protrusions form the moving part of water bearings a la the Kugel sculptures you’ll see at museums. The north bearing will be the most visible part of the moving structure; about half of it will protrude up our of the surrounding terrain. So the flywheel won’t precess, its axis has to be parallel with that of the Earth’s rotation and so its axis is inclined upward at 33.8 degrees toward north. I’ve rerun the math to supply just the state of Georgia instead of all the SE US states. I’m assuming a transfer efficiency of 90% for the flywheel system. Here’s everything but the cryin’:
Flywheel weight: 487.6 million tons
Maximum spin rate: 17.46 RPM
Minimum spin rate: 0.17 RPM
G force at outer edge of flywheel at max RPM: 129.6
Stored kinetic energy at max RPM: 4.0PJ (roughly 1/4 Krakatoa)
Oversupply factor (how many times annual energy demand the total annual supply must be – highly influenced by transfer efficiency): 12
Equivalent battery volume at max RPM: 37 million cubic meters (cube 333 meters on a side)
Equivalent battery cost at max RPM: $2.78 trillion
Area of real-world solar PV farm to generate the supply energy: 13172mi^2 = square 115mi across
I find these numbers genuinely frightening. Gail and I are coming to similar conclusions from different directions: to use her phrase, solar PV energy is “low-quality” energy and can’t be anything but unless you resort to what, to us, are extreme measures. But at the same time our current electrical generation and distribution system is an extreme measure; it is a megamachine that girds the entire planet. Its moving parts are many and may be very, very small. but consider that within each grid reliability region (e.g. ERCOT) they are all moving *as a unit* along with the phase and frequency of the grid power at any given moment.
Those are some hilarious stats!
‘There are no permanent friends or enemies…. only interests’
Australia must choose between United States and China: U.S. Army official
“We are balancing relationships between our largest strategic ally and our largest trading partner with deft diplomacy, consistency and pragmatism,” Bishop said in a statement.
China is Australia’s biggest trading partner and a large source of foreign investment, spending $11.1 billion on Australian assets, mostly property, in 2015, accounting and advisory firm KPMG and the University of Sydney have said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-australia-usa-idUSKCN1173AX
An interesting find on the internet:
http://www.ewea.org/events/workshops/wp-content/uploads/proceedings/Analysis_of_Operating_Wind_farms/EWEA%20Workshop%20Lyon%20-%205-4%20Keir%20Harman%20GLGH.pdf
The link above is a PDF from a renewable energy consultant company GL. It is therefore 100% pro renewable energy. In this link, it looks like we have a lot more issues on wind turbines that I have actually assumed. From the presentation, you have the following issues (not all points but just a summary of key points):
1. Non-optimal controller settings
2. Component misalignment / sensor error
3. Icing
4. Bugs
5. Dirty blades
6. Wind condition – flow inclination, turbulence intensity, shear profile and air density
I did not do a lot of research into wind turbines as I am more of an electronics engineering guy (PV, semiconductor, computer, etc) but I am rather surprised that these are the factors that reduces inefficiencies. It does not really cross my mind but for items 1 – 5, you really need people to go up there and do the work. Not sure if we have the skills, knowledge and parts if things go south. Not everybody can just climb up and clean the blades. You really need BAU to take down the entire wind turbines and repair. If it is offshore, it is even more dangerous, expensive and resource intensive.
Item 6 is really something you need BAU to get it done. With all the equipment, sensors, satellite readings to pick a good place. Wind farms are usually very far from civilization and the means to carry the electricity to the civilization will be interesting and challenging unless you don’t mind having electricity only when you have wind (or when the wind turbines are spinning).
The more you read about wind turbines, the more problems you discover. Wind turbines are like cars, in that the have about a 20 year life expectancy. They also have a lot of moving parts. Historical data shows that repair costs on aging wind turbines is high. Information on new wind Rubin’s says that costs are low, apart from costs paid under warranties lasting a few years. Simply adding in these casts raises the price a lot. There is also a problem with bankrupt manufacturers not being available for spare parts. Also helicopters are sometimes needed to install the parts.
Exactly, folks tend to think that once all these wind turbines are built that is the end of our need for fossil fuels. We would be on a treadmill trying to keep up the pace replacing all the broken and breaking wind turbines well before they produce enough power to replace fossil fuel fired power plants.
In a nutshell: solar and wind power simply create more for us to maintain whereas fossil fuels actually do the job of powering society..
The replacement parts need to be of precisely the right kind. This implies long supply lines will remain in place for all the necessary materials. In some cases, the original manufacturer will need to be in business and selling replacement parts. There is also a need for installation equipment. In some places, helicopters are required.
Thanks for the link! I expect that this does not contain all of the issues–ones like fires, and like utilities not being about to use all of the electricity produced.
This is a renewable energy consultant. Same like don’t expect to a car dealer saying that the car want to buy is a lemon !
Helicopters are expensive, especially if they are in remote areas like offshore wind or a rural zone. Back in 2005 when I was in Bethel, Alaska we had a helicopter pilot who charged around $1,250 an hour to fly into rural villages to bring parts or personnel in. 12 years later it can only have gone higher. Offshore wind repairs and maintenance could be even worse, requiring expensive custom built ships with the equivalent of a giant cherry picker bucket on it.
I also lived in Kodiak, Alaska for about 6 years. They’ve successfully installed 6 windmills for a town of around 7,500 people and it has mostly freed them up from running diesel generators for electricity generation. They also get considerable electricity from hydro.
I found this chart on the Kodiak Electric Association site.
According to the statistics given, 80% of electricity generation comes from hydroelectric for 2016 YTD, and 82.9% of electricity came from electricity for 2015 year to date. Practically none of the electricity came from diesel. Wind amounted to 16.9% of the total in 2015, and 19.6% of total generation in 2016.
This article indicates that they were using diesel to provide about 20% of their power before the addition of the wind turbines. Hydroelectric is clearly the cheapest energy source around at 6.8 cents per kWh. Hydro is very good for balancing, allowing them to add wind up to the 20% they have now. The chart claims that wind–which we know is heavily subsidized–is available at 11 cents per kWh. A good guess is that the wind really costs something like 30 or 40 cents per kWh, before subsidy. But with subsidy, it looks great compared to unsubsidized diesel. Unsubsidized diesel is said to be 28.90 cents per kWh, when diesel is $3.50 per gallon. If diesel is really $2.50 per gallon rather than $3.50 per gallon, then the cost of diesel generation is really more like 20.64 cents per kWh. Wind appears cheaper thanks to its heavy subsidies–not because it really is cheaper.
If I lived in Kodiak, I would be looking for more hydro, if that is at all available. The second best option would be better insulation and saving electricity, so less generation is needed.
With the subsidies and lots of people and spare parts available to fix wind turbines, wind looks good. But it is hard to see that it is going to be a great solution. Kodiak Island, with all of its hydroelectric is one of the few places that can balance as much as 20% wind. It is possible that they can even balance somewhat more than 20% wind. But it is a very complex system to try to keep operating.
It’ll never work long term but it was terribly fascinating watching it all get implemented. I remember seeing the giant GE things getting drug up the mountain roadways.
I don’t think insulation would make much of a difference in electricity usage. Many people in Kodiak or nearby areas keep warm with wood and/or heating oil. I’m not entirely sure what the heating oil is, probably kerosene or something. The interior of Alaska does this a lot as well, probably because it cuts down on electricity usage.
Fast Eddy, I don’t have to take any crap from you. You are wrong about everything. Let me repeat that…you have not made one correct call in however many years you have been writing about doom.
You are a sad, sad man.
Of course you don’t dolph — click here http://www.peakprosperity.com/
Your ideas will we mainstream there — you will be welcomed — you will even be offered survival tips (for a small fee…)
Fast Eddy ROCKS!!!
You might be under the false assumption that your ‘ideas’ are only opposed by a very small minority of posters here.
i think I would speak for many here by saying that your various arguments are so utterly flawed in so many unspeakably horridly stoopid ways that we hesitate to actively refute them because it is difficult to know where to begin.
The silent majority … has spoken.
Those of us in the “developed” (profligate might be a better word) countries have become accustomed to 24/7 electricity availability and rather view it as a non-negotiable birthright. The thought that we might have to put up with intermittent electricity – the way many people in other parts of the world do – is just not a topic to be discussed in polite conversation.
It strikes me that the situation we will eventually arrive at is one where there is 24/7 electricity available at a steep price, probably mostly from hydro, but for the overwhelming majority there will be intermittent electricity and if you want storage, arrange it yourself. The only open question is what the road to that destination will look like. Our great grandparents didn’t have 24/7 electricity and our great grandkids won’t either. We are the odd ones out.
“Our great grandparents didn’t have 24/7 electricity and our great grandkids won’t either. We are the odd ones out.”
I suppose I’d be one of those great grandparents (I have grandchildren of reproducing age, who as yet, glory to the highest, have not so far done so.) I grew up without 24/7 electricity. And doing without it again wouldn’t phase me a bit.
No electricity for a few people is not a problem … no electricity for all people is bad news for the forests.
Thanks Gail !
Looks as if our politicians have found a way to subsidize the destruction of what is left of our modern civilization. The Medieval world lived in a wind and solar world (although not electric). Perhaps they think that that is better than nothing ? Perhaps they are in panic mode ? Perhaps they know that a civilization on a higher complexity level is beyond our reach ?
the simple facts are there’s just too many of us and once BAU ends a die-off will commence leaving a tiny part of the current population alive if were lucky
In Wyoming, every few years, years, the jack rabbits have a big population surge. You see them everywhere. At night by headlight you see you are always surrounded by hundreds of pairs of jack rabbit eyes. You drive down the road, not even trying to avoid jackrabbit collisions because by swerving for one rabbit you just end up hitting several others. Coyotes and eagles are active at this time as they gorge on the rabbits. The Wyoming blacktop is no longer black- it is continuously red with blood of dying masses of jackrabbits.
But by early winter, it’s all over. Literally millions of jackrabbits have been wiped off the face of the earth in a few short weeks. The roads are still covered with furry jackrabbit debris that is stuck on the blacktop till it rots away. You still see a few survivors around but nothing like the rabbit population of just a few weeks before.
When nature wipes out entire populations, it’s not usually pretty.
There is no getting around a huge die-off. When that happens technology will go with it and so will our energy supply and thus electricity. Everything we are born into today in the modern world is artificial and unsustainable. What can’t be sustained must eventually stop. And I for one subscribe to the bigger they are the harder they fall paradigm. So, our mega-complex, massively energy hungry society will fly apart like a car going 600MPH and crashing from a small bump in the road.
The car is now aimed for the cliff edge. And is accelerating.
“If we continue to add large amounts of intermittent electricity to the electric grid without paying attention to these problems, we run the risk of bringing the whole system down.” Ms. Tverberg, unless I missed something, you are not offering any alternative other than bringing the whole system down, because staying the course will destroy our ecosystem and all life as we know it, and reducing population to a sustainable level would destroy the economy as we know it. Is that the extent of your message: the sky is falling and there’s nothing we can do?
Your argument seems to be built on the premise that the large scale utility grid — even Hawaii is hundreds of miles across — is non-negotiable. Last I checked, there were millions of people in developing countries who still have no power grid at all. For them, any renewable power, even though it may be transient, is a net benefit because it gives them a few hours of smoke-free light after dark, a few hours of cell phone service, a few hours of pumping water up a hill.
Large scale energy storage is indeed problematic, as is large scale hydropower or large scale natural gas peak generation. What do these problematic things have in common? The small scale equivalents are not nearly as problematic and have been used for centuries on six continents with great results.
If the grid cannot tolerate renewable energy, and non-renewable energy will kill us all, then maybe we need to consider getting rid of the grid. Not just a handful of us, but all of us. Yes, it will require a lifestyle change. But the alternative, making the entire world uninhabitable, also appears inconvenient. What do you say?
I apologize for my defensive tone above. Rereading the article in context, it occurs to me that your intended point may have been that the grid cannot be sustained by any means. Is that correct?
Gail says that if we increase renewable energy into the grid, we will increase the difficulties in the future. It’s very important to understand.
Not to be angry with gravity when we fall from a skyscraper. In collapse lot of good things could be done if we assume all this.
The collapse is the natural order of the things.
We need to understand about one FACT about this so called “renewable” energy & that is that it’s NOT “RENEWABLE”, please, everyone, lets be honest here, ANYTHING that uses NONrenewable resources to generate electricity is NOT “RENEWABLE, so let’s stop calling this electric generating technology “renewable”.
It mucks up the grid with more than 20% penetration, it’s NOT “renewable”, it’s NOT sustainable, it will NOT keep the lights on for very long after the oil age & as for that nice hot shower thanks to your solar panels, enjoy it to the full but you will still be STARVING for lack of FOOD.
People keep forgetting, solar panels & wind turbines cannot produce ANY of the ESSENTIAL RAW MATERIALS we now get from fossil resources especially OIL & natural gas!
Without OIL & NATURAL GAS we will be UNABLE to FEED 7.4 or more BILLION HUMANS, BILLIONS of US will be dying of starvation, disease, thirst & in wars in the not so distant future.
So what if you can still pull up a hot shower, how good will that feel on an EMPTY STOMACH that will never again be full?
I have a 45 caliber solution to that problem, I don’t intend to become “long pig” & neither do I care to starve in the hot darkness of a runaway greenhouse.
There are things worse than death & I have seen many of them.
Good post. You seem to have some pretty strong convictions here which are based on practical experiences.
Do you mean by “long pig” is that humans could descend into cannabalism when the fossil fuel/food system collapses?
How do you see the fossil fuel/food situation evolving as we go forward into the next few decades?
“Long pig” is indeed what the people of Papua New Guinea called human food & from my extensive reading about those in survival situations, “long pig” will be on the menu again, it was in the past during the famines of the dark ages & I think we will again be seeing human meat in the butcher shops. Not all people in desperate situations end up eating their companions, but it’s quite common, remember the Donner party?
Civilized people when hungry enough, will turn to “forbidden flesh” to survive.
How will this play out? There are many paths our collapse could take but all paths lead to collapse no matter what we try to do now, we are simply too far into overshoot, something we knew many decades ago but thanks to RELIGION, was ignored because we are not an “animal” but a “special creation” so we are exempt from the laws that every other living thing has to follow.
That belief is WRONG & we will suffer terribly because of it.
We will suffer food shortages, energy shortages & world governments will become increasingly oppressive as they fight to keep control of the masses, we are EXPENDABLE to them our rulers.
I think we will not be able to trust our neighbors, they will rob our gardens, steal our stash, perhaps even eat our pets & children, desperate people will do desperate things, things they wouldn’t normally do. It will be every person for themselves, it won’t be kumbya either. I remember the “hippy” days & communes, didn’t work out then & they won’t work in the future either.
Religion will be pushed to keep the masses controlled, faith will be encouraged as a way to mitigate their distress & many prayers will be heard from our “leaders” as things go down hill.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? WW2 should ring some bells, even Hitler publicly went to church, he was a Roman catholic who was never excommunicated by the church, our leaders also like being seen as devoutly religious, makes them just like us eh?
Our corporate controlled media will continue spreading lies & propaganda like how “renewables” will lead us into a sustainable future, that there is a plan to keep BAU going, not to worry, keep buying stuff you don’t need with money you don’t have.
I know the media has been shutting out the protests & demonstrations, we only hear about them in the alternative media or the foreign press but most people in the US are more concerned with who won the “BIG GAME”, what’s on TV tonight & how will they repay their student loan & get a job that pays enough to do that?
I expect to see more protests, more police violence & not just against people of color, the homeless or the poor, but US as well.
Get over “white privilege” that is ending.
Nyara said, “look at Venezuela right now: even if the electric supply is a mess right now, there is still plenty of economical activity and people there is not dying of hunger or suffering from basic needs at all. ”
Your wrong here Nyara, Venezuela is suffering food shortages, shortages of toilet paper, sugar, flour & other essentials, crime is rampant. They have to stand in lines for hours in an often futile effort to get some needed commodity like toilet paper, flour, sugar or milk for their babies. (Why aren’t they BREAST FEEDING their infants? if they had been, their baby wouldn’t need COWS MILK! )
I am also sick and tired of our corporate media blaming “socialism” for it’s collapse, not it was not “socialism” that caused the collapse of Venezuela, it was the steep drop in the price of OIL that 90% of Venezuela’s economy depends upon.
How dumb does our corporate media think we are?
Very apparently for most people are spouting that same lie, socialism caused the collapse of Venezuela so that’s why Sanders had to “lose” the FRAUDULENT “ELECTION”.
We in the rich world are going down, that won’t be on our TV’s, just like our protests & demonstrations aren’t on TV, it will instead be “happy hour” all day & all night until the lights go out forever.
Learn to love an ox, survivors will be looking at the rear end of one for a long time IF they survive.
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“We need to understand about one FACT about this so called “renewable” energy & that is that it’s NOT “RENEWABLE”
You have reason. The “renewable” energy is not renewable.
How can we define in OFW? Green energy, alternative energy … ?
Solar and Wind “Capturing Devices” ?
I think I read the name here. Sorry I can’t remember who said it.
I once proposed “Converters”,
Or “High-Tech Energy Converters”
Solar panels and wind turbines are inefficient, intermittent, energy capture devices. It takes a lot of energy to produce them and there is a lot of pollution from the process of building, installing and maintaining them. The production of these energy capture devices depends upon a very complex infrastructure, raw material, global transport and finance system that took centuries to build up. Layer upon layer of complexity underlies solar and wind power.
Folks seem to have this illusion that technology creates energy. Rather it is the consumption of energy that creates technology which again uses energy to do useful work. The more dense the energy source the high level to technological advancement a society is capable of. But lets not loose sight of the fact that technology consumes energy and does not create it.
Good point.
It’s interesting to compare FF and solar energy. The FF(petroleum here) is mined by drilling a few tiny holes into the earth and accessing petroleum reservoirs. These reservoirs contain a concentrated geologically processed fuel of fantastical properties and energy density. It then only needs to be tapped into & then transported to refineries. Processing into useable fuel is a relatively simple operation. And the waste from this process produces boundless material for roadways, medicines, plastics, chemicals, agricultural chemicals and land working machines.
With solar power, we are putting out large sections of industrially manufactured recieving panels that must gather up small bits of sun-source electrons and then combine & modify them for standard household & commercial electrical systems. It’s the exact opposite of the fossil fuel gathering process.
Right!
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That spells out the stark reality of it….
The grid depends on dispatchable power – power that we can schedule. Intermittent sources require back-up or storage, which greatly increases costs. They also require much larger collection grids at lower utilization, which increases grid costs. Reliability decreases with intermittent sources. Our massive dependence on fossil fuels must transition to clean and reliable sources. As testified last year at an EPA hearing –
“Effective control of rising CO2 is not financially feasible for even large electric power generation companies, using currently available technologies and RPS constraints. These companies and customers are not “capable of shouldering heavy substantive and procedural burdens. (EPA wording)” as their visceral connection to global economies prohibits deploying grossly non-economic and reliability-reducing power generation technologies. Space Solar Power is required to effectively address rising global CO2.”
– Summary statement of Darel Preble, Space Solar Power Institute (501(c)3 educational non-profit) for Atlanta EPA Public Hearing, November 19, 2015
I expect that it is difficult to get the EPA to understand what the issues really are. It seems to take actual bankruptcies and actual areas without reliable electricity, before they will understand what the problems are.
Solar panels cannot be manufactured and transported without fossil fuels.
The mines and smelters that provide the raw materials for solar panels require fossil fuels.
All of this requires a global system of trade and finance.
In short — what you are suggesting sounds wonderful — but is impossible.
There is no BAU Lite
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It seems to me that the conversations that take place on this blog are important. Gail’s blogs are clearly important, and I wish that millions of people would read them whenever she posts. But the framework within which these posts and conversations take place is problematic. On the one hand the conversations are about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). This is as it should be. Gail and others talk about how these fields can be applied to solving our energy problems. On the other hand, the conversations are about the GREEB fields: Government, Religion, Education, Economics and Business. Some of these fields play large roles others not so much. But the STEM institutions must heed the GREEB institutions in order to get the funding needed to apply their skills and knowledge to solving our nation’s critical problems. Fortunately, the STEM institutions are fact-based, they are rational. Unfortunately, the GREEB institutions are based on ideologies, not on facts. These institutions are irrational. This struggle between the rational and the irrational can be seen in many ways. And our supply of money is one of those ways.
Whenever I tell others that we have an unlimited supply of money, I often get three reactions: the supply of money is limited, whatever you spend must be recovered by collecting taxes, and if you don’t collect taxes to pay for what you spend, runaway inflation will destroy our economy. In other words: “Weimar! Hungary! Bolivia! Zimbabwe!”
When I ask people to furnish proof that we have a limited supply of money, the answers get vague and confusing. Most people who respond are angry. Their anger reminds me of the anger that comes from some of my friends when I ask them why God allows innocents to suffer. Their anger is directed at me, not at God. But others do not get angry, they engage. Some say that there is a limit on how much money the government can issue. And that is true. In 1917, Congress passed the “debt limit law” which is just what the name says it is. It says that the government must borrow to get money to pay its bills, and it can only borrow a specific amount of money before it must stop. At that point we will run out of money—we can’t pay our bills. But that is an artificial limit imposed by Congress nearly a century ago. Times were different then—we were still on the gold standard and there was an actual physical limit to the amount of gold.
However, now there is no such dependence on something physical and therefore there is no limit on our money supply. The fact that Congress can routinely pass a simple act that raises the debt ceiling is ample proof of that fact. Once such an act is passed, life goes on just as it would have if the debt limit law had never existed. It is clear that the debt limit law is not truly a limit to the amount of money that is available to us—it is a human-made barrier to economic prosperity that has become another political tool for the extraction of votes and campaign contributions from the people—tyranni are as tyranni do, and they do it with all their might.
Then the conversation begins to drift. Nobody can give me proof that we have a limited supply of money. We can impose such a limit on ourselves if we choose, but such an imposition is not a natural limitation on the supply of money. So, I ask people if they agree that the United States Treasury can, if it wishes, turn its printers on full blast and print money from now until the end of time. Most folks agree to this ridiculous idea in the same way they would humor a four-year old. They say that such a silly thing is possible, but we shouldn’t do it because runaway inflation will ensue.
Yes, hyperinflation has occurred in world history, and it was devastating to the nations who endured it. But it hasn’t happened very often and its causes are well understood. Matthew O’Brien published an article in The Atlantic Magazine in which he discussed the four worst cases of hyperinflation since the beginning of the 20th century: Hungary (1945-46), Zimbabwe (2007-09), Weimar (1922-23), and Bolivia (1985-86). O’Brien succinctly described the conditions that led to these economic tragedies:
“It [hyperinflation] typically begins with an economic implosion. War and revolution are the usual suspects—or in Zimbabwe’s case, an ill-advised land reform. The economic collapse begets a collapse in tax revenues. Perversely, this makes the government look like a terrible credit risk. Cut off from international lenders, the government is left with a gaping hole in its budget, and no way to fill it. The choice is between pain today from austerity or pain tomorrow from printing money. It gets worse. These governments usually have piles of foreign debt to pay off, too. Whether it’s from reparations or excessive borrowing doesn’t matter so much. What matters is that big chunks of what cash the government does have is earmarked for foreign creditors. That’s politically toxic in a society going through a collapse. For politically weak governments, the temptation to substitute an inflation tax for actual taxes is enormous.”
The German Weimar Republic is a well-documented example of O’Brien’s analysis. It emerged in 1919 from the German Empire which lost World War I. Near the end of that war, the German government was ready to crumble. The arrival of American troops and supplies in 1917-18 pushed it to the edge and it approached President Woodrow Wilson to ask him to broker a peace settlement. Wilson had publicly described the kind of peace settlement he thought would be appropriate. The Germans told Wilson that they would accept a peace agreement along those lines. So the victorious allies: France, Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States met in Versailles and worked out terms that they forced on the Germans. The Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese had no say on the terms. The terms were shocking. They required the Germans to pay millions in reparations and those payments should be in gold or in foreign currency—not in German currency. In addition the Allies took possession of all German colonies, took over the German merchant fleet, and later took over the Ruhr, Germany’s mining and industrial region. These terms clearly could never work. The Germans had no gold or foreign currency, so they defaulted on their reparations payments. For the German people there was no money, so the government printed it. This might have worked but the people by then had no confidence in the German government and soon hyperinflation erupted. Instead of creating a world at peace, the tyranno-capitalists who were in charge created World War II and the Great Depression.
None of this was a surprise. John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who went to Versailles to advise British officials on the economics of the proposed terms, warned that these harsh, draconian terms would impoverish the German people and lead to a generation of German youth who would hate the Allies. He said that the peace terms were nothing more than seeds of war. He resigned from his post as a government advisor and wrote a book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” which became a worldwide best seller. He was right. The Weimar Republic failed catastrophically and provided fertile, prepared ground for the irrational, tyrannical, horrifying ideas of Adolf Hitler.
America is not like Weimar, or Zimbabwe, or Hungary, or Bolivia. We are the richest country on earth. People from other countries, including the countries themselves, buy our bonds. Our debts are denominated in our own currency, not in foreign currencies, or gold. Some people raise the alarm that our debt to China will bankrupt us should that country ever demand payment. But this is a false alarm. China buys our bonds because we are a safe haven. In effect China is buying certificates of deposit in a secure bank: the United States of America. We sell bonds to foreign governments to help them manage their own economies. We don’t need to sell bonds in order to raise money. In spite of all the blustering and bluffing that goes on internationally, China and America have a mutual interest in creating and sustaining productive, inclusive economies. But if China should ever wish to cash in its bonds, we will happily pay the proper amount—in our currency.
If we use our unlimited supply of money wisely we will greatly reduce the risk of hyperinflation—but we will not eliminate it. In addition to foolish money management, there are three other things that could cause hyperinflation: rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels, nuclear war, and asteroid or comet bombardment from outer space. We can still do much to reduce and adapt to the adverse effects of climate change—provided we change our monetary system. We can do little to keep Vladimir Putin, or some other tyrannus in Russia or some other nation, from attacking us with nuclear weapons. We can do even less to protect ourselves from a natural rain of ruin from the heavens. Any of these three catastrophes can produce the requisite conditions for hyperinflation. They each can devastate many of our largest cities, they can severely damage our food and water supplies, they can disrupt our power, transportation, and communication systems, and they can make key areas uninhabitable or otherwise useless. Huge portions of our population will become migrants, with no place to go—and nothing to eat. Should we suffer any of these catastrophes, we will be like Weimar, or Zimbabwe, or Hungary, or Bolivia—but on a worldwide scale.
We are the strongest military power on earth. We are in little danger of ever being invaded by a foreign power. But if we become weak, if we have a large part of our population who are left out of our economic wealth, if we do not produce the goods and services that we need to keep our population healthy, happy, well-educated, well-fed, well-trained, well-equipped, well-housed, well-paid, and well-motivated to work long and hard, without financial distractions, then we can destroy ourselves. Climate change due to global warming can produce great economic dislocations. Right now our economy is severely, dangerously, perhaps fatally, constrained by the tyranni who control our government. They selfishly want to increase their wealth and power at the expense of the rest of us—which undermines the strength of the nation as a whole. By increasing the amount of money that is available to all Americans, by carefully managing the money supply, and by wisely spending that money, we will accelerate our economy so that we can combat the adverse effects of tyranno-capitalism and of global warming, and in so doing, raise the standard of living for all citizens.
So, what it boils down to is that money is an agreement within nations and between nations. It is a convenient way to conduct, track, and manage our economic activity. We are free to print, really “activate” is a better term, as much of it as we please, and we are free to distribute it by any system we choose. We should be grateful that we do have an unlimited supply of money, and we should use it for the benefit of all.
Those who say that disaster will strike if we just spend, and spend, and spend are right. Our unlimited supply of money is so vast that to just turn it loose on society would be like trying to drink from a fire hose—we simply could not handle it. But you and I are rational enough to realize that we should manage our supply of money so that it will help us instead of hurt us. Our unlimited supply of money should be spent on worthwhile, non-inflationary projects, and we will have to drain excess money from our system as well.
The tyranno-capitalists have taught us, with the insidious help of many prize-winning, well-paid, and very wrong economists, that we must tax the people in order to have money to pay for the goods and services that the government must provide. And we are taught another crazy idea: we must balance our books every year. We fall for it because it has the ring of truth—after all, somebody has to pay for these things. It is an old, painful story. It is also unproductive. It holds us back. It is a lie.
We don’t have an unlimited supply of money. We have a supply of money that is debt based, and because of this appears to be unlimited. Debt serves many functions. One of these is to raise the price of commodities.
Money is in its origin the tokenization of energy – to be consumed right now or already embedded in products (houses, cars, screw …). As the global net energy shrinks the amount of money necessarily has to be reduced in the same pace. It doesn’t, but answers with de facto inflation. Debt is a promise of paying money/net energy back at some time in future. This is getting still more difficult because – again – net energy at our disposal is diminishing. The amount of money has to correspond to the actual net energy at our disposal. Therefore it gives no meaning printing more money if corresponding amount of net energy is not there. And that is exactly what the world is experiencing now. If renewables must receive money from its financial environment they do not contribute with energy, in contrary they suck energy out of the country in which they are installed and paid for.
The basic issue is that the economy must hold together to repay the debt. Once the financial system stops working, we have a huge problem. Alternatively, once governments stop getting enough resources through tax revenue–essentially net energy being given to than, they collapse.
“The amount of money has to correspond to the actual net energy at our disposal.”
I don’t think that this is true. The amount of debt, and the amount of money, are whatever they are. Having more debt tends to keep commodity prices up, and thus keep BAU operating longer.
All of these promises will eventually be proven to be false promises. We can make as many false promises as we choose. This is why pension plans have so many problems. Social Security is funded on a pay as you go basis, but it has similar problems with false “sort of” promises.
“All of these promises will eventually be proven to be false promises”
Yes!
Because the net energy is not there to fulfill all our material dreams.
“Then the conversation begins to drift. Nobody can give me proof that we have a limited supply of money.”
Money = energy … energy is definitely limited….
Money – sure you can print as much as you want — but all that does is dilute the dispersion of the remaining energy.
Consider Weimar Germany …. one day a wheelbarrow of money buys a can of tuna.
The central bank later that day furiously prints out massive amounts of cash.
Meanwhile – no boats are arriving with more tuna.
Does printing more money create more tuna?
Of course not.
All it means that you have more money and the same amount of tuna.
Therefore the next day you need two wheelbarrows of money to buy your can of tuna
It is worth listening to The Big Man …. not so much the rant …. although that is quite amusing ….
But listen to what he says at the end….
Thanks Gail, really interesting to see this kind of breakdown on the economics of renewables.
Is everyone here familiar with Tom Murphy from http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math ?
He’s worth a browse if you care to read someone who comes to similar kinds of conclusions to the FW crowd but from a thorough understanding of physics, math and electrical engineering.
One of his most fascinating insights, which Gail’s economic analysis echoes, is that there is much more to energy workarounds than technical breakthroughs. To paraphrase one of his ideas; A technical way of ‘powering down’ and using renewables to achieve BAU is not nearly enough. Such a transition would never happen as the rapid cultural shift needed to achieve it is an impossibility. To change our behaviour as “homo industrialis” we would ALL have to divest ourselves of ourselves and become completely different people first. And there is no foreseeable mechanism for that kind of revolution in human affairs.
Note:
The above idea of course merely tweaks the following:
“DNA [and a life of acculturation] determines our behaviour.
We cannot, en masse, dismiss either so…
therefore we cannot change the course of collapse.
Dear futuresystemsanalyst ;
You said, “DNA [and a life of acculturation] determines our behaviour.
We cannot, en masse, dismiss either so…
therefore we cannot change the course of collapse.”
So true, and a very useful thing to remember. It means (for one thing) that there is no reason to be angry with global warming deniers or others that are (or were) in the forefront of putting us in this position. Humanity is what it is.
Have you seen my theory that the Drake equation needs another variable? f sub s is the fraction of planets that at any point produce an intelligent creature capable of producing an industrial economy that does not use up all of their resources. f sub s is always 0, so N is always zero. That is why ET does not visit.
Alone in the Universe,
Pintada
To demonstrate this ..
Ask 10 people the following…
If I had the power to grant you:
a private jet all expenses paid for the rest of your life
houses in 5 locations worth up to 5m USD each all expenses paid for the rest of your life
20m USD per year after tax inflation adjust the rest of your life.
Would any of the 10 say no?
If you could go back in time 200 years and bring along a chain saw with you and a tractor … and put on an exhibition in a farming community… then asked the farmers if they’d like one of each…
How many would say no?
as i’ve said before—-if Rockefeller had stuck a sign on every petrol pump—OIL KILLS PLANETS we would have still burned the stuff as fast as possible
+++++++++
Big fan Gail
https://lokisrevengeblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/peak-renewables/
Loki is a serious thinker on climate, sustainability, etc and has an excellent grasp of the big numbers involved. He works all the numbers for alternative energies etc and definitely pulls no punches.
Go check him out.
On Loki’s blog
“Aluminum is fire prone as a conductor and far too expensive.”
Aluminum did get a bad rep as house wiring, but people figured out how to get around that problem. But expensive? Go outside and look at the power coming into your house. Unless it’s a really old neighborhood, you almost certainly have aluminum drop wires.
As for running out of gallium, http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-08/hd-apo082616.php
I have recently been looking into gallium since concentrated PV runs over 40% efficient. The question is, do we have enough to build 15 TW of power satellites? The answer appears to be yes.
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“even if wind turbines and solar PV could be built at zero cost, it would not make sense to continue to add them to the electric grid in the absence of very much better and cheaper electricity storage than we have today.”
“Why We Still Don’t Have Better Batteries
Startups with novel chemistries tend to falter before they reach full production.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602245/why-we-still-dont-have-better-batteries/?set=602257&utm_source=MIT+TR+Newsletters&utm_campaign=ec29b5f953-The_Download_August_29_A_B_C_From_name_8_29_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-ec29b5f953-153961373&goal=0_997ed6f472-ec29b5f953-153961373&mc_cid=ec29b5f953&mc_eid=662b7fd83b
I’m typing this on a tablet powered by a deep-cycle battery which was charged yesterday by a solar panel — my last two deep-cycle batteries lasted about a year each (it’s hard on a battery to keep running it way down, like that).
I also wonder where they’d get the lithium for all these battery systems — last I heard, the main sources for lithium were in the Andes of Bolivia & Argentina (lithium isn’t even stored in ingots, but in a liquid solution).
Global Supply Chains Paralyzed After World’s 7th Largest Container Shipper Files Bankruptcy, Assets Frozen
“today the largest casualty finally emerged on Wednesday when South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping, the country’s largest shipping firm and the world’s seventh-biggest container carrier, filed for court receivership after losing the support of its banks, leaving its assets frozen as ports from China to Spain denied access to its vessels.”
Those printing presses must be running WAY hard right now…
You just can’t rely on Zero Hedge for information about this stuff, though. Almost everything they say is wrong. As I’ve heard it said, they’ve predicted 4958 of the last 2 financial crises.
They ran a story about a complete shutdown in global shipping that was completely based on the writer not knowing how to interpret the interface he was looking at.
LMAO… You understand they are a news aggregator? Anyhow, “they” only have to be correct one time. You, on the other hand can’t afford to be wrong even once.
You read but don’t believe 100% what is written. That is the reason why we gather around Gail’s fireplace to chat and discuss. It is because the other 99.999% of earth”s population who belives 100% what the MSM is saying and refuses to give it a serious thought if they are telling a lie, that leads us to this “no solution” situation.
75% of ZH articles are rubbish …
vs
99.5% of articles in the MSM
We are also neglecting the fact that oil supplies more than just concentrated, portable liquid energy, it’s a vital raw material, it feeds us, warms or cools us, it cloths us & is a raw material for thousands of products including medicine, without it, most of us would not even exist.
You don’t worry much about the lights being out as much as you worry about the next meal after the trucks stop delivering food.
So many people seem to be convinced that solar panels & wind turbines are “renewable” even after you explain to them why they are not, they just can’t seem to get it or perhaps, they don’t want to “get it”. If it’s made with non renewable components, it’s not “renewable”.
Along with solar panels & wind turbines, another over hyped technology is electric cars. Has anyone figured out where they are going to get the electricity to charge all those batteries? Can they even make enough batteries for so many electric cars? I don’t think so in both cases.
It’s real tough to accept that if you survive climate change, you will be back to chipping rocks for tools again.
Magnificent!
The MSM is truly a powerful beast…. as you point out – they have convinced people that something made from metal and glass in a factory is — renewable …
Of course if they grew from trees – or you had male and female solar panels and you could breed them — yes that would make them renewable.
But people do not question – they do not think — they cannot think – they don’t want to think?
They want comforting words…. most do not question words that soothe them….
I wonder how far the MSM could take this joke…. could they actually convince people that a circle is really a square …
I wonder if Don Draper and his buddies sit around the conference table and contemplate ad campaigns that serve no purpose (are not commissioned by the El.Ders) other than to take the pi.ss out of the donkeys that are otherwise referred to as the masses….
“It’s real tough to accept that if you survive climate change, you will be back to chipping rocks for tools again.”
Stone tools are not so bad.
I have witnessed a serious primitive skills devotee take a piece of blunt chert, chip it out into a nice 3 lb axe head in about 20 minutes. The axe head was then attached with wet sinew to a hickory handle and left to dry.
This guy took that chert hatchet and proceeded to section a good-sized section of oak trunk into kindling in about 2 minutes w/o breaking a sweat. That stone hatchet practically sang as it flew through the dense hardwood.
I have never seen anything like it.
Carl Sagan had a saying: “Just because ancient people were ancient doesn’t mean they were stupid.” Or unknowlegdeable or bereft of skill.
I can imagine if the ancients observed us twerking and tweeting – they’d have a good laugh
Most of the stone axes I have seen at work just took out messy, small chips of wood, it was tough, sweaty work to cut down a tree & man were the “natives” happy when they got steel or iron axes & used one to cut down a tree, big chips flew off that trunk & the tree was down in no time at all.
Those people were very glad to trade in their stone axes in for a steel or iron blade!
Knapping stone is a skill that takes time to learn & there is much more to it than just picking up any old rock & chipping it, it has to be the right kind of rock & it has to be heat treated first just so then an assortment of tools is used to shape the stone into a tool.
Where stone really shines in when used as a knife or scalpel, there is nothing sharper than an obsidian blade for cutting flesh.
When Cortez “visited” the Aztec people in Mexico, his soldiers were amazed to find that their horses were so easily slain by Aztecs welding obsidian (natural glass) axes. Sharp stuff.
I’m 4 months along living with my self contained solar system in my out of the way country doomstead and I thought I’d share a little experience with energy storage. I bought bought my solar panels because they were such a good deal, 10 – 230 watt panels for $1700 Canadian, so knock of a third for American equivalent . The rest of my set up including batteries? $23,000. That bought me a system that gives me 2 kW a day so I have to be frugal. First thing you need to know about batteries is the depth of discharge or DOD determines how long your battery will last. For example discharge it 80% and you’ll be buying new batteries every 3 years, at 20% you should get 20 years . The batteries I chose are nickel iron designed by Thomas Edison and they’ve been around for 100 years and used in submarines and the v-2 rockets in WW2 they are reliable and long lasting and costly. My first surprise was my electric motors don’t like the sine wave of my inverter so instead of using 746 watts to power my 1 horse power water pump it uses double that, my next surprise was my 2300 watt panels only delivered 1200 to 1500 watts to my batteries ( too many conversions from DC to AC and back again , hot day? Knock off another 15% because solar panels operate better in cold temperatures. One issue I didn’t plan on is they need 2 gallons of distilled water every month so there goes any saving in electricity! BUT if I can flush and turn on my lights and use my power tools for a few more years I’ll be happy!
A guy tried to sell me a full system like this – 25 years in the biz… he said ‘don’t believe the 20 to 25 year battery story – best I have seen is 12’
I wasn’t aware you could even use a non-solar compatible pump with a system…. have you tried to make it work?
I have ‘state of the art’ Lorentz gear (kind of like a velvet Elvis painting is state of the art art….) — and it broke within a month…. spring has arrived so I will be revving it up again in a couple of months … we’ll see if the fix lasts more than a month
Hi Eddy, you should know I’m taking your advice and trying to live the life for 5 months but my real challenge is to do it without everyone knowing.( don’t want them thinking I’m nuts). If I could I’d bail out today but I rented my comfy water front home out so I would have no choice but to give this lifestyle a go. Of course it’s impossible as we do use the electric car to keep coffee and wine in good supply but as to food, water, fuel we are either at self sufficiency or could increase our output to reach self sufficiency. That is as long as we ignore friends and family.
I searched for 48 and 24 volt pumps that would pump from our lake but the system I would need was too complicated with storage tanks and lift pumps plus pressure pumps etc so I accepted the inefficiency of converting AC to DC and use of the shelf pumps. So far so good as we have a sizeable garden and my pump is 15 years old so I’m searching for the pump that delivers the most gallons per minute per wattage used.
I think now I know why you opted for New Zeland – no sense worrying about family and friends if they are half a world away.
I’d suggest standardising on 48-50VDC where you can.
Your reference to your electric motor reminds me of an inverter I worked on a while back. Twelve volt lead acid batteries are a really bad starting point if you want an efficient system. Unless your motor is getting really hot, its efficiency is likely around 90 percent, so yes, inefficiencies elswhere in the system are going to hurt.
Your analysis does not consider the external costs of fossil fuel based electricity generation. It only considers cash costs. While I am in favor of full accounting of energy costs, that needs to include externalities such as CO2 emissions that are causing climate change that will likely be severely debilitating if continued at current levels. Continuing with fossil fuel energy generation is not a viable option.
“will likely be severely debilitating if continued at current levels”
How would you suggest we avoid becoming debilitated?
Continuing with fossil fuel energy generation is not a viable option.
And not continuing with fossil fuel energy generation IS?
Right–we have basically reached a “no solution works” situation.
So-called renewable electricity generation may be useful on a temporary basis to continue such essential services as water pumps and hospitals. As Gail has pointed out, problems can be expected due to the sun not always shining, the wind not always blowing. More than that, however, is how the whole economy is affected by the raft and range of systems and resources issues so as to make it far more difficult (or next to impossible) to source the funding for construction of wind turbines and solar panels, maintenance and replacement of such, and payment of electricity bills. Yes, there is the option of small scale local supply, but only for as long as it takes for one critical component to wear out and not on such a scale or with such an EROEI as to make it possible to continue the economies and lifestyles we have grown accustomed to in the developed world.
Then there is the issue of how long it takes to make the transition versus how long it takes not only for global warming to cause serious problems that close the door on civilization, but also collapse in general due to resources and systems issues proceeding at a pace that exceeds the pace that we can make the transition.
Even if we now started on the full-scale all-in transition as Robert Hirsch previously suggested was necessary, it would now be too late, not enough, of only temporary effect.
“full-scale all-in transition as Robert Hirsch”
What was the transition he suggested?
Robert Hirsch wrote a report on Peak Oil for The Pentagon some years back. He warned that twenty years would be needed for a crash programme to transition away from oil. Given that efforts since then have been directed more toward getting more oil than transitioning toward a post oil economy, we have lost time and gained very little of any benefit.
Given that so-called renewable options rely upon finite resources and contribute to global warming (thanks to thermodynamics), our only option is to power down. One problem with that: we will not be able to support the population we have. Another problem: very few people (relatively speaking) would be inclined to voluntarily give up electricity, cars, smartphones, banks, retirement schemes, etc for the sake of giving humanity a chance. Let alone other species.
Therefore, our only option as a species would appear to be that of waiting for collapse to occur in a chaotic manner.
There is no transitioning to a post oil economy …. that does not involve the extinction of the species…
So therefore the decision to get as much oil out of the ground as possible — was a good one
“What was the transition he suggested?”
Robert Hirsch never said, but from the things he hinted at, they are worse than your nightmares. I tried to talk to him on the phone years ago about power satellites as a way out of the mess and he like to burned my ear off. But in more recent times, he seems to have reconsidered and is (or was) involved with a fusion project in San Diego. Most people can’t maintain hopelessness for more than perhaps 5 years.
Another good post Gail
I think it is simpler then we think. All sustainable systems require two things. First they must be able to reproduce themselves. Meaning they must produce more energy then it takes to produce them. Second they must be 100% recyclable meaning that all the elements can be reused in future production of the system. If these two requirements are not met the system is not sustainable.
When evaluating Solar or Wind something no one seems to comprehend is they need to be installed at 300% of present utilities because of intermittent production. So storage is an absolute requirement. When these things are added as I have sent you the EROEI plummets to less then 2:1 much less in reality.
Interestingly biological life meets the the requirements of sustainability. Perhaps we were meant or design to live that way.
Installing 300% i.e. ‘excess’ capacity does not solve the problem if the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow.
‘When evaluating Solar or Wind something no one seems to comprehend is they need to be installed at 300% of present utilities because of intermittent production.”
Not only that. The entire wind/solar energy infrastructure must be replaced every 15 to 25 years. So how would we replace a global renewable energy infrastructure in 20y when the fossil fuels are not available to help? Even worse, the entire renewable energy complex would need to be completely replaced maybe 4X before 2100.
In perspective, we are now at the high peak of fossil fuel industrialism and still can’t get the renewable energy solution(?) up and running to a significant level. How do we do it in 50 years when fossil fuels and the machines that use them are not working anymore?
Even folks that have lots of wind/solar capacity need to ask this question. What happens when you have solar/wind energy but the world no longer has an industrial manufacturing system to make products able to use that electricity? When even simple machines like light bulbs are no long being manufactured? What good would electricity production be then?
Dear Sungr;
You asked, “What happens when you have solar/wind energy but the world no longer has an industrial manufacturing system to make products able to use that electricity? When even simple machines like light bulbs are no long being manufactured? What good would electricity production be then?”
Great question. I have thought about it extensively over the last decade, and just as the question implies, the value of any electricity that one can generate, and the value of even thermal solar drops to zero very quickly after the end of BAU. If you can’t run your recirculation pump, or if the only recirculation pump that you have breaks, that is it for solar thermal heat.
I think I can keep everything here running for as long as a decade (under the right circumstances) because of the spare parts that we have.
After that decade is over, the world will be a very different place. My tribe will need to move close to the river. Gardening will be possible only if they can find a horse, and they can get water from the river. But if someone can make it ten years, hunting and gathering will be very possible for a while.
Sincerely,
Pintada
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I live now here in the sunshine State of Florida.
Yesterday I voted in the Primary election and one item of interest was this that passed in regard to Solar energy
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/florida-voters-pass-solar-tax-exemption-in-statewide-primary
Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment in the statewide primary yesterday that clears the way for solar and other renewable energy systems to receive a property-tax exemption, creating the opportunity for distributed solar to expand in the Sunshine State.
Amendment 4 specifically authorizes the Florida legislature to exempt solar projects on commercial and industrial properties from both the tangible personal property tax and the ad valorem real estate taxes. The amendment builds upon existing law that exempts residential customers from paying property taxes on renewable energy systems, including solar PV, wind turbines, solar water heaters and geothermal heat pumps
I voted Yes myself…shame there are so few solar water heaters installed here.
You can understand why it is so hard to figure out how much subsidy there is for solar. Everyone wants to “help.”
I understand your concern, but my take on solar water heaters is their capital outlay equals electric or gas water heaters. The fact is once installed, the electric or gas companies are out of the profit stream.
Not that this at all really matters….hot shower water will be low on the want list after the wheels fall off.
Let’s just say, this initiative is a day late and a dollar short.
I have an indirect measure of climate change from our solar hot water heater. We’ve had one for about 17 years now, upgraded once about 7-8 years ago. Both models feature a conventional hot water heater for prolonged periods of low sunlight. When we first used it, there were many times during the year, especially in the wetter winters, when we’d use the conventional heater. Now, especially in the past few years, we hardly ever use the conventional heater. It seems to be measuring less and shorter periods of low sun due to clouds and precipitation. Lots of short-period rain events, fewer big fronts passing over.
Thanks for that observation! Glad I’m a Senior Citizen….😨
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=krD4hdGvGHM
I watched that show and we are indeed coming upon interesting times ahead!
Dear Vince the Prince;
You said, “… hot shower water will be low on the want list after the wheels fall off.”
Not necessarily, I intend to imagine Fast Eddy crashing his car in the most dramatic way possible, and dolph loosing his mind, while having a nice hot shower from my solar thermal system. The schadenfreude thus enjoyed will compensate me for its installation many times over – just for that one use!
Sincerely,
Pintada
Is this a comedy site or what? I can’t stop laughing.
Me too…go Goldie….shake
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DOPZsexPNPE
CTG, I sympathize with you because you obviously have put much thought into this, and you made a very long post, only to come to the wrong conclusion at the end.
But that’s ok, right? It’s not as if we doomers were going to get everything correct. We have our own stumbling blocks as well.
Addressing electricity: it’s not a question of how much. Intermittency, yes, to a certain extent, but this can be worked around. It’s a question of: what is the minimal that you need? What is the absolute minimum amount that you need to ensure we don’t shut down right now?
And the answer…orders of magnitude less than what we are currently using. There is virtually no need for large scale exterior lighting at night, nor for businesses to operate 24/7. Heck, even at home, if all electricity were to shut down at night, your only real problem is food storage. Admittedly heating is a problem in cold climates, but who says that humans need to live in cold climates. The dominance of cold climate countries is a new phenomenon, for the vast majority of human history, the warmer climates were dominant. And even then insulation and thick layering of clothing go a long way.
As far as industrial processes, look we’ve been over this. Industry doesn’t matter anymore, what matters is IT and the media. You only have to create the image now, you don’t actually need to engage in any large scale works. So yes, you do need the internet, servers, etc., but you actually don’t need them running 24/7.
Electricity simply isn’t now, or on any meaningful time scale, going to shut down or be a cause of collapse.
Guess what dolph?
I agree with CTG. Really. Why you ask?
Oh I dunno – could it be the extensive use of facts? The real world examples? The logic?
Perhaps because I have resisted becoming this… although I can understand the appeal of such a lifestyle….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Huc47Dqsg8
And if I were he… I would not try to explain to you how completely wrong you are… how you have zero understanding of everything in that excellent post
Because that would be a complete and total waste of time.
You clearly are incapable of comprehending this issue… you are immune to fact and logic bullets and bombs… we have thrown everything at you …. not even a hair out of place….
You are Super DelusiSTANI…. we might have to take out the kryptonite….
The electricity grid is the largest, complex and most fragile construct of modern civilisation. Even interruptions of a few weeks at critical nodes would be more than enough to render the whole system consigned to the dustbin of history within months, once the repair crews are unable to get to the problem, or worse, are dead because of a lack of electricity or motive power to keep them at their jobs, healthy or fed.
Our JIT system for supply chain does not permit anything more than 3 days. There is a publication “When Truck Stops, America Stops”. It is a PDF file that you can download from Google Search. Alternatively, you can have a look at https://www.truckerclassifieds.com/infographic/truckpocalypse
We boxed ourselves into this corner in the name of “extra profits” and “efficiency”. 70 years ago, we don’t have this problem and we have buffers to “restart” if there is a crash or disaster. Now, with much more people (increased population), more consumption, less inventory in the supply chain, we are just inviting disaster to our doorstep.
UK fuel strike in 2000 – the UK government admitted that had the strike extend another 1 week, UK will be at a state that is economically unrecoverable. Do a Google search and read for yourself.
Our JIT system for supply chain does not permit anything more than 3 days.
Even worse than I thought…
https://i.imgflip.com/14w3jb.jpg
More grid doom…
The Day The Lights Go Out And The Trucks Stop Running
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Lights-Out-Public-Domain-460×259.jpg
What would happen if some sort of major national emergency caused a massive transportation disruption that stopped trucks from running? The next time you talk to a trucker, please thank them for their service, because without their hard work none of our lives would be possible. In America today, very few of us live a truly independent lifestyle, and that means that we rely on the system to provide what we need. Most of us take for granted that there will always be plenty of goods at Wal-Mart and at the grocery store whenever we need more “stuff”, and most of us never give a second thought to how all of that “stuff” gets there. Well, the truth is that most of it is brought in by trucks, and if the trucks stopped running for some reason the entire country would devolve into chaos very rapidly…..
as i keep banging on
our entire existence is predicated on converting explosive force into rotary motion
civilisation in just 6 words
Again as mentioned, this is the real world that we live in. We can ignore reality but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. It is pure 100% fantasy and ignoring reality by saying that we will be perfectly fine if the grid goes down! Does anyone just give it a hard thought? Do we even have critical thinking? Where does the chicken sausage comes from? Ask a very urban child and they will say “supermarket”. Our food is so removed from the source that not many know the long supply chain and logistics involved.
Went pass an ice cream parlour. It was closed as there were no electricity. All the ice cream melted. Do the Romans have this problem? I find it kind of fascinating that people can compare this modern day collapse with the Roman civilization collapse. I am always in awe that the difference is so great that it is not even comparable and yet people are still comparing it to the Roman civilization collapse by saying that the Romans to hundreds of years and we will take a few hundred years as well.
…and yet people are still comparing it to the Roman civilization collapse by saying that the Romans to hundreds of years and we will take a few hundred years as well.
Agreed. Completely delusional. According to overshoot expert, the late W.R Catton, modern man is probably at least 10 times past carrying capacity for humans on this planet. And that is on an unravaged, pristine world. And as to our delusions – just part of our evolutionary baggage no doubt…
I look at my work now in Electrical Engineering and 95% of my job is done on a computer and a phone. I have a few printed books on my desk along with things like Ampacity tables and various electrical standards but if the power was out there goes my CAD program, there goes all of my access to my files, sure I can calculate a voltage drop by hand but it will take me a few hours. Heck when our warehouses have power outages they shut down because everything is computer controlled and electric, even the forklifts are all-electric. If the power goes out for a long amount of time the organizations and industries that we support (including wastewater treatment plants, power generation and distribution companies and heavy industry) will go largely unsupported meaning it will be that much harder to get things going again. Just my humble opinion.
My wife recently had a health issue that put her in the hospital for surgery. The entire place is lit up by all kinds of fancy, expensive machines consuming electricity. Computers everywhere. The surgical instruments themselves are complex electrical appliances- this is not just a man and his scalpel.
I marveled at the number of people moving in and out of surgery that day- dozens of them. I imagined how many would quickly die from their conditions if they were unable to get their respective modern medical procedures. Multiply that by every hospital in the city, every city in the state, every state in the country, around the developed world. Every day.
Huge numbers of people are being kept alive by our electricity powered, JIT medical system. People that will quickly perish outside of industrial civilization, when it’s once again the law of the jungle.
practically Every “downsizer” blissfully ignores the factory system employed in our healthcare—yet when downsizing really kicks in, they will demand healthcare remains as BAU
If industrial is not required anymore… where are the masses going to earn an income to survive? Internet/servers does not need to be turned on 24 hours a day? I am in Asia and you are at the other side of the world. So, are the servers switched off during my night or your night?
Who builds the servers, the infrasturcture? Who builds the servers? chips? the machine that builds the machines that builds the chips?
I have read somewhere in the internet – we cannot have a service economy. We cannot be cutting hairs for each other as an economy.
I am not a doomer but a realist. I have been through what many have not been through and I am not blaming them. Dunning-Kruger effect. They may not have the skills, knowledge or experience. I do not wait for things to collapse but rather I use that as a means for me to live my life the fullest.
I have worked 20 years in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. I have knowledge in electronics, electrical, microelectronics, physics and computing. I was also involved in many residential civil engineering projects. I have completed my MBA from one of the top schools in UK and have knowledge in finance, supply chain, banking, etc. Currently, I am an owner of a business that relies a lot of internet and technology. I have many websites, liaise with the people in India where work is delivered online. I should have a great future and be very successful in life but unfortunately, what I have learned from all my work and education, I cannot “unlearn” what I know. As what Gail has shown, most of the people have a narrow view on what they learn or know, everything is micro and nor macro and everyone wants to be an expert or think like one.
I have given up on telling people what will happen as things unfold. It is pretty sad to see so many people are “fighting” over climate change. It is kind of silly to think that nothing will happen on earth even after we have dumped billions of tons of CO2 and man-made gasses in the atmosphere in a short period of time and expecting nothing will change? Which part of the history of earth that has such a major change in less than 150 years? The key is the speed of change.
Our body is having a tough time adapting to the changes that happen in the last 150 years. Our body, for the last hundreds of thousands of years are adapted to the circadian cycle where we sleep and get up according to sunrise and sunset. After the invention of the light bulb, we force our body to change. The Chinese believe that certain period of the night is meant for repairing certain parts of the body. e.g. 11pm-12am is for the liver, 12am-3am is for the heart/lungs. Is there truth in it? Probably, if not, why would someone 4000 years ago come out with this theory? (there is smoke where there is fire).
We do not really exercise, have high carbohydrate and sugar meals, hunched at the computer doing our work, the eyes never look further than down the street (you cannot see the horizon in Singapore – See all the ships dotting the coastline)
https://d2qyg8c48afywd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Screen-shot-2013-04-05-at-PM-05.31.42-e1365154949517.png
Being a realist is not the same as doomer. I never put any time frame on when things will collapse. History has shown many times that this will happen. It is just a matter of time. It is also just a matter of a few people knowing all these will happen.
Do I look forward to it? No ! Do I envy those who are ignorant? Yes! Do I regret knowing it? No. I have seen so many of my friends doing so much for their careers and neglecting their families. For me, I have a good balance. If my kids want to fly kites, we will go and do it rather than saying “Dad is busy over the next 3 months, let us do it some other time next year !”
+++++
I am loading up in the morning … and heading to a remote part of the west coast of NZ for the specific purpose of watching stormy weather drive the ocean onto the rocks…
I will bring a book – my fishing rod — a mountain bike…. and I will stuff some food into an ice box… along with. a few bottles of wine…
I think I will also bring along Madame Fast….
Time is short… do whatever needs to be done while it still can be done…
Dear dolph;
You are one of the more useful trolls that I occasionally read in that you occasionally find a hole in someones argument, or more frequently push someones button and make them really think. This time, I’m sorry, it just sounds like you are off your meds.
If they weren’t needed, they wouldn’t have been prescribed,
Pintada
Self- prescribed 🙂
Dolph – I have an idea for a Joint Venture…. you sell me bulk prescriptions for various ‘stuff’ — I retail them on through another site I have under construction….
http://www.anythingyouwant.com
My stable of online assets is growing…. this gets added to http://www.strifetravel.com
I will soon be able to purchase
http://site.privatejetdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Private-Jet1.jpg
My sympathies over your loss Gail.
Been involved in Permaculture and gardening for many years.
Just learned of a Tree Collard that appears to be a wise addition to ones garden.
Purchased a cutting from California and hopefully it will take here in Florida.
Seems not only will feed you and your family, but chickens, rabbits, and goats like to eat the leaves as well!
Can last 20 years and moderate feeder.
Here is a link for those interested.
http://projecttreecollard.org
The folks state the reason you don’t see them for sale at nursery outlets is the cutting take a long time to establish. I will purchase other varieties after this purple grows.
Will follow up and let you know if is a winner.
I wanted to post this lengthy post but unfortunately, the blog has too many comments and no other comments can be posted. It may be slightly off topic (i.e. not renewables)
I would like to present an alternate view on surplus energy and society in a layman’s term. It is extremely difficult to explain to the masses on EROEI, EROI or MROMI (courtesy of David Cooper!). Everyone needs to be aware of Dunning-Kruger effect. What you think as easy to understand may not be easy for someone else especially if the someone else is not trained or uneducated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Energy surplus is required for all forms of human civilization. Let us turn back the clock to 50,000BC where there were no permanent settlements. Homo sapiens were just wandering tribes of hunter gatherers. Evolution was at its peak and only the fittest survive. Our brains were turned to that kind of environment where food was uncertain and anyone who were not fit will be eliminated. There can never be any “Honey, I have a headache and I am not going hunting today”. Humans harnessed external energy like fire to make life a little easier for them. However, in terms of surplus energy, there is none. Animals were killed and eaten as there was no way for them to store long term. No other additional energy were required to maintain the family unit as the weak were left behind or eaten by predators. There is no permanent settlement as they need to follow their prey and are at the mercy of the weather. They may use external energy like fire but they do not have surplus energy. Energy was provided by human muscle. There were no surplus food and even if they have, it was only for a short period time (i.e. how long can meat last in the open/wild before it spoils or taken by other predators?) Life was short and very hard. The old and weak could not survive.
Let us turn our clock to 4000BC when there were early form of settlements. There were villages and crude farming were being carried out. Humans began to make forts and with farming, they are not worried about being eaten by predators or have to follow the migratory patterns of the animals. Life span was longer and the weak and the old were not be “eliminated” by nature. They lived to an old age. Due to farming, we have stored grains as “surplus energy”. It is this surplus energy that is used to provide for the old and the weak who would otherwise unable to survive just 20,000 years ago. It is at this time that humans have subverted “survival of the fittest” and it is at this point that “survival decay” started where Darwinian evolution has been subverted. The little bit of surplus energy in the form of stored grains help the society and it flourished.
We turn to 2000BC or 1000BC or where great civilization started everywhere in the world. Advances in farming and irrigation started with aqueducts being built and more farming tools were used. The amount of surplus energy, again as stored grains, fruits or through livestock grazing increased significantly. How did society used those surplus energy? TAX !
In order to protect the kingdom, a leader was chosen and an army was built. Taxation is a form of redistributing the energy by decree and not by free market. Excess grains, lifestock and fruits, were taken from farms (or individuals) as a form of tax to the kingdom and in return, we will provide you with security and some conveniences. The grain is then used to feed the king, the courtesans, builders, army, tax collector, priests, artists, etc. If the surplus is a lot, then some of them will be used to pay the builders to build temples, bridges, temples, etc. The excess energy is also used for trade (food for the horses, caravans, etc). Money was not required as it was food that were used as a medium of exchange. Shoes were exchanged for 2 bags of rice. It is the “government” or the king that levies taxes and each farm or community has to contribute certain amount of grains, livestock or copper/gold/silver for the miners. Kingdom collapsed when the king taxed too much and excess food (or surplus energy) is gone to feed the massive army or for wasted indulgences (i.e. monuments, etc).
Moving on to around BC/AD timeframe, many civilizations began to experiment with money as their society were getting more complex. Due to advances in agriculture and animal husbandry, surplus energy has increased. There were more peopled not involved in food production as the society was capable of feeding them. Together with free market, surplus energy was traded for other things like jewelry, pottery. Money made things easier where the farmer, other than paying taxes in a form of grains, fruits or wine, can sell them in the market. The farmer keeps some grains and food for their own use, pay the taxes and the rest, he traded for some luxuries or other necessities.
As society advances through the ages, more external energy is required like wood, coal and eventually fossil fuel to generate the surplus energy that is required to support more and more complex society. Complex society can be crudely defined as a society where most of the members are not involved in the production of food and are involved in tasks that are irrelevant to survival. You need “A” to watch how “B” works so that “B” does not screw up. In order to ensure that “A” is working, a committee is set up so that they can monitor “A”’s work. So, in a very complex way, “B” is the only one working while “A” and the committee are just redundant but they still need to be fed and housed. It is these surplus energy that the society needs to maintain its lifestyle.
In the olden days, if the forest gets less and less, it gets further and further away from city centers. The logs have to be transported miles before it reaches the city. Without the use of horses, there is a limited amount of wood one can cut and transported to the cities. With horses, the radius of forest that can be chopped down is larger but there is still a limit. When fossil fuels were used, the limitation disappears. With railroads, steam-powered equipment (tree chopper??), any tree from anywhere can be fell and transported to the city centers. It does not matter if it is expensive or not as there will always be rich people who wants exotic wood.
When the low hanging fruits of fossil fuels are gone, more equipment and knowledge (translated to the layman as “more money required”) are required to extract that kind of external energy that the society needs to ensure that there is a surplus of food (i.e. surplus of energy as mentioned earlier on). Surplus energy dwindled as it became too expensive to extract and many organizations or individuals just simple do not have the will power, energy or financial resources to extract it. Imagine if the moon has a large pool of very high grade oil. How much energy is needed to extract it for use on earth?
The problem is that the modern society, due to availability of cheap fossil fuel, they harness that external energy to create food (surplus energy) to feed all those not related to food production. When it is gone, it is gone. The surplus energy will go with it and the society collapses.
Since the 1970s when Nixon closes dollar-gold convertibility window, the use of credit has masked the effects of falling surplus energy. If it is too expensive to extract oil, no problem, take a loan. Cannot pay the loan, no problem, just default. The new owner will take over the company. The basic groundwork in oil extraction has been done but the old loans has been written off. So, the new owner can still make a financial profit as the site has been half complete. HOWEVER, in terms of energy, the previous owner has spent a lot of energy on the site. That energy has been wasted (i.e. the money defaulted and someone actually lost money in that previous venture). So, the new owner declared that it is making a profit but in essence, there is no surplus energy as previous owner has spent it. In other words, credit has masked the effects of dwindling surplus energy.
Multiple that that by a million times and with money printing, you will get into a situation that is entirely fake. It does not show the real situation where the surplus energy is actually declining until it is too late.
Just imagine, if I were to time travel back to 100BC and I brought along tons of petrol, tractors, chainsaws, steel, fertilizers, steel bars, tons of medication (antibiotics) and tons of modern conveniences that we have taken for granted. I will be GOD to the locals. I form a community in a remote area so that other tribes/civilization does not what I am doing and married a local. My community flourished and the population multiplied. I can do all the work easily. With the help of modern equipment that I have brought with me, my community is heaven on earth. Disease is not a problem. With fertilizers, every crop is a bumper crop and we have lots of surplus food and energy. After sometime, I realized that my stash is running very low and it can disappear. As I have fertilizers and other modern conveniences, only 5% of our community is working on food production and it is just a small acreage that we used for food production. The rest of the land are houses and recreational areas. Most of the people in the community are just living off our surplus energy and we are now in an overshoot situation. To make things worse, the knowledge on farming without fertilizers (i.e. they know how to farm indigenously before I arrive there from the future) is gone and no one knows anything about local herbs, plants and grass that can cure simple diseases. Guess what? The whole community collapse overnight when there is not enough food (or surplus energy) and none will survive because the local knowledge on survival was gone.
Xabier (IIRC one of the commentators for FW) mentioned that we have climbed the ladder of civilization successfully and for each rung we climbed, we kicked off the previous rung (destroyed it). It is a one-way ticket up and it is just not possible for a society or the whole world in fact to live a simpler life. We have kicked away the old ways. Just a mere 25 years ago, internet was not present. Now, if the internet is down, the whole civilization collapses (don’t believe me, just think again if anyone can do a telegraphic transfer to another bank without internet) almost immediately. No mobile phones, civilization may even end but not as dramatic as internet. No electricity? the end will come in less than one week. Same goes for an EMP event (Google Carrington Event).
We are not only in an “overshoot” region, we are orders of magnitude into the “overshoot’ region. Like the example above on time travel, just enlarge it, instead of a community, it is the whole planet. That is where we are now.
If you have talked to the really rich people or the elites, you will know they are not smart. In fact, it is the opposite. They don’t have to be smart to enter top universities. With a lot of “in-family marriage” to prevent the assets and money leaking out to other people. They will marry other aristocrats or other rich people. Genetic disease is common among the elites as they will marry among themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family. They are so totally detached from reality that they have no idea about the world outside theirs. The Feds are making up their moves “on the fly”. (see Yellen’s speech at the Jackson Hole Symposium). There are no plans or New World Order. They just make things up as events unfolds. Just a common sense question – how do you get the world’s powerful and richest people to work together for a “common good for the elites”? Do you think you can get them in a room and put away all their ego? That is not human nature.
Hope that Collard Tree helps CTG….wicked post
I was never a doomer. I am a realist who sees the big picture.
Yo, You got to EAT!….Try doing it without industrial fossil fuel imputed agriculture.
Their blog also has some tastey recipes
These perennial veggies are great for the backyard organic vegetable gardener or mini farm as they never stop producing. High in Calcium!! Sweeter and Tastier than regular collards (especially during the Fall, Winter, Spring when the whether is cooler and the leaves turn purple). And it’s one of the favorite foods for our chickens. Here are some of the locations where the TCs are thriving that I’ve shipped to: Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, Southern California, Oregon, Washington and of course California.
If you and/or your family, friends, neighbors eat lots of greens, it’s worth it to have at least three tree collards growing for abundant, continuous harvests. Once you have some mature plants, please do your part in making new plants and passing them on.
http://treecollards.blogspot.com
Actually in my country, Malaysia, greens are not a problem.
I’ve always thought that a doomer was someone who was wishing for the end of days…. likely because they were living in misery….
I think there are very few of these types on FW
I have empirical evidence that doomerism is not a prerequisite for visiting this site!
I am very likely the most unsuccessful, misanthropic, miserable bastard you are likely to meet…(jn other words – classic ‘doomer’).
How many times a week do I think “if only BAU would keep going a little longer”
versus
“I can’t wait till BAU explodes and my miserable life was over”
The result is overwhelming in favour of the former.
Is that right? All the more reason to add this wonder plant to your garden mix….
You’ll be in a better position when the SHTF and folks are devouring the native greens until they are all gone. You’ll be sitting pretty with this trouble free perennial tree collard harvesting the leaves for yourself because no one will the wise what it is!
As a matter of FACT, Fast Eddie lived in your part of the world and moved out.
He claimed that without the magic pellets of artifical fertilizers the place would starve.
Keep dreaming away CTG…
And I will starve here too….
I lived in KL for half a year… Malaysia is as good a place as any to see off civilization… at least it is warm…. has good durian too.
CTG…seems Malaysia does have a problem…ugh
“We have no choice but to import food from around the globe because local food, especially fruits and vegetables, are not only not enough to meet the local market’s demand but are becoming more expensive by the day,” Mohd Anis told Malay Mail Online recently.
“This is simply because we don’t have enough land in Malaysia and not to mention, the price for labour and pesticides have all shot up,” he added.
Compared to the preceding year, vegetable exports dropped by 91 per cent, while fruit exports saw an increase of 94.4 per cent – See more at: http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/why-malaysia-imports-vegetables#sthash.C2tnv0p4.dpuf
I like the idea that it’s a perennial. Unfortunately, according to the site, it will not tolerate my cold…
ACHOO!
Well, in my place, we have all local vegetables.. not sure where the local newspaper get their news…
CTG…same thing here…in my place right now there are plenty of veggies!
Gee Wiz, can’t for the life of me why at all there should be any concern? (Sarcasm).
Bye, bye 😕
Very nice summary of our predicament. We are all victims of our species success.
It is not just energy surplus that is needed; it is energy concentration. The energy must also be of exactly the right type for the machinery using it. This is part of the way academics have missed the point–all energy is not equal. Those who assumed that intermittent electricity was the same as other electricity missed an important part of the story.
Fully agree. Energy concentration my 50,000 energy slave will never be able to power my trans-Atlantic flight even though their energy output in terms of kWh is similar. Just a few thousand gallons of aviation fuel can let me take the flight. No amount of PV or wind turbine plus the super heavy battery will allow me to take a flight across the great seas…
When everyone talks about PV and wind turbines no one talks about flights because even the “experts” have to acknowledge that it is not possible. That is why they stat very quiet… ssshhh. .. shhh..
Dr Tim Morgan has written a book about surplus energy economics and he runs an excellent blog.Norman Pagett in The End Of More makes the same points and of course posts here. Yours is an interesting commentary along the same lines.Keep it up and there is a book in it. Just kidding of course.
David Barnes, Sydney.
the number of word-permutations one can use in the field are ultimately limited, as are the number of walls to bang one’s head against.
everybody—including me—hopes the problem will go away, i have grandchildren after all, i want them to have the happy life i’ve had.
For the moment they think writing keeps grandad busy and absorbed in a different kind of dementia.
CTG, very good summary of the nature of the things. ( Dē rērum natūra).
I have enjoyed it, thank you!
Gail, thank you for the new post. First, wish to give my condolences to your Family and the untimely loss of a loved one.
First, Saw on a television news segment that triple A roadside car emergency aid has record calls due to battery problems. Seems new cars with the extended electrical functions place a drain on car batteries, which only last for about three years of normal use. How good is a car or PV system without batteries?
AAA says newer technologies in cars are contributing to breakdowns. Keyless ignition systems in some vehicles can put a major strain on the battery.
“That along with all the electronics on cars today will drain the battery more quickly….the life expectancy rate of a battery is only three years and if you have that battery for more than 3 years you’re living on borrowed time,” said AAA spokesperson John Townsend.
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2016/08/22/aaa-tech-in-new-cars-contribute-to-rise-in-breakdowns/
So, these systems are only good for the short term.
I hadn’t heard about the drain on batteries from keys. Thanks for pointing it out.
It’s probably the anti-theft system, and they also tend to load other electronics eg central locking sensors onto the load. Also, the battery you want to turn over the starter motor isn’t the same battery you want to use for enetertainment.
Get a bigger or better alternator or a second battery. I’ve had to use second batteries before with car amplifiers and subwoofers because of the power draw. When the bass would hit it would dim the car lights from the draw. Can’t count how many people wrongly pointed out that a capacitor would solve the problem.
In short, trying to graft on distributed renewables onto a system designed for centralized generation is like trying to bang a square peg into a round hole.
One technical solution that doesn’t break the existing arrangement is to not allow back feed from residential solar generation (thus keeping the energy flow going in the usual direction). However this means no net-metering etc. You’d meet your own domestic generation needs when you could and any excess would have to be dumped locally (house battery maybe or hot water?). When you couldn’t meet your own needs, you’d take from the grid just like you do today. Without net metering however, the economics of residential solar go sideways.
What does this look like?
Does every home have their own self-contained off the grid power system?
Any thoughts on how much that might cost — without subsidies of course…. (rhetorical question but feel free to respond….)
If people are paid what solar is worth to the electric grid, which is very little, the economics of residential solar would also go sideways. Net metering is a giveaway plan.
The idea of each house using what they generate is probably as good as any–use the excess to heat water, or keep a battery going. If people want to have solar off grid, I have no problem with it. I just don’t think the costs should be government subsidized.
“I just don’t think the costs should be government subsidized.”
Totally in agreement. The renewable subsidy ultimately relapses on the poorest. For example, across an increase in the costs of the electrical invoice. This is not good for the economy at his set. The one that wants renewable, that he pays it. Thank you for his brave article. One will speak about him in the future.
In the US, are there additional subsidies direct to solar panel manufacturers or installers, aside from the consumer tax incentives that make the economics work for the homeowner?
For example, my own grid-tied solar system cost $25,000. I get a $7,500 income tax credit, so in essence I pay $17,500 and the government pays $7,500. Is that the only subsidy along the line, or are there additional subsidies taking place up the supply/production chain?
In 2016 the U.S. will learn if renewable energy can survive without government support. The most significant tax credit for solar power will expire at the end of 2016, and the biggest one for wind already has. These federal subsidies have provided wind and solar developers with as much as $24 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That’s led to a 12-fold increase in installed capacity over the past decade, helping lower costs at least 10 percent each year.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-05/say-goodbye-to-solar-power-subsidies
Solar and wind companies scored a major victory when U.S. lawmakers voted to extend lucrative federal subsidies for renewable energy late Tuesday night.
The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that extending tax credits for wind power will cost taxpayers $14.5 billion, while continued solar tax credits will cost $9.3 billion.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/wind-solar-companies-get-boost-from-tax-credit-extension-1450311501
The first quote you quoted was written before legislation was enacted that extended tax credit for wind and solar.
Now the timing is as follows:
There are other programs that provide subsidies as well to wind and solar, especially at the state level. There are also state mandates that require renewable use, almost regardless of cost.
There is a flaw in approaching the question of solar-generated electricity by referring to the ‘residential’ mode of production.
Some critics have pointed out that even if ‘residential’ systems were workable (economically and technically) they have very little applicability as a global solution. The small amount of roof space afforded by apartment and terraced buildings which the majority of the world’s urban dwellers inhabit results in a pitiful roof space per capita ratio.
Dear jphsd and others;
You said, “… meet your own domestic generation needs when you could and any excess would have to be dumped locally (house battery maybe or hot water?). When you couldn’t meet your own needs, you’d take from the grid just like you do today.”
You described my system perfectly. I “save power” by sending it to the grid in the summer when it is most needed for local irrigation systems. Then, in the winter, I use electricity to supplement my thermal solar to heat the house, greenhouse, etc. . Right now, I have about 6 MWh available for the coming winter. They never pay for any excess.
Someone mentioned shoddy installations … yup … I get the system installed, and then go back and fix it myself – up to and including ripping everything out and starting over. There isn’t any other way to get it done because of the local Planning and Zoning Nazis which require bizarre things and mandate that a “professional” do the work, but it still is dirt cheap because of the subsidies. Sorry Gail, the initial system was nearly free to me because of subsidies. Planning for the inevitable permanent grid failure, however, really set me back.
Unfortunately, what I do does not solve the problem that the utility has. I doubt that my $8.00/month rental on the net meter goes very far to maintain the hundreds of miles of wires they must maintain to stay in business.
This post is another example of why I keep coming to your blog. You have done high quality work in identifying the difficulties of producing energy in the right quantities so it will serve our society, and in the right way so that it will be dependably responsive to demand. I learn something every time I go through your arguments. But I do have a difficulty. You seem to be inserting these methods of energy production into an economic system that is unchanged. In other words you seem to think that the current system of capital, ROI, and taxation will be essentially the same. If this is so, I am puzzled. It would be far easier for our government to change the way our financial system works and make it into something that will change the cost/profit structure than to devise a new energy production system that conforms to the wishes of those who have money to invest.
A new system would reward companies who have their own capital to invest in new production systems, and it would have more than enough money to invest in good ideas but which do not have a sufficiently high upside to please the private investors. We have plenty of money to invest so that we don’t have to worry about profits. We only have to worry about the production systems themselves—and whether they will do the job for the long haul.
So, designing a new energy system must begin with designing a new system of capital investment based on the idea that we have an unlimited supply of money. Once we do that, the way forward is purely one of technical capabilities, equipment, natural resources, personnel, the status of the environment, and whether we have enough time to do what we must. Money is an inexhaustible national resource. So long as we spend it on worthwhile, non-inflationary projects we can go as fast as humanly possible. Money, interest rates, ROI, and the like will not matter.
I think you need to read some more of my posts. Money is basically debt. The financial system is the way we assign value to individual resources, and the way we transfer resources from one part of the system to another. Government is basically overhead for the system. Economies collapse if their governments don’t get a large enough share of the goods and services produced transferred to them.
We hear a lot about net energy. One of the major things net energy allows us to have, is government. If you check, you will figure out that a very significant share of oil revenue actually goes as taxes–this is part of what makes all of the discussion about high oil prices so confusing. You can’t substitute renewable energy for oil, unless you can somehow find a way for renewables to generate enough “net energy” to also support government. So far, they have simply been getting big subsidies, instead of paying any taxes. This is backwards from the way the system needs to work.
As long as the system has overhead–that is government–someone has to have enough surplus to pay for it. The energy systems are very important in this regard, because energy products are what all of the movement and action we think of as making up GDP. If energy is produced cheaply enough, wages can be high, and taxes on wages can also support the system. If renewable energy is expensive, the system doesn’t generate much in the way of wages either. It is hard to tax wages, because there aren’t much wages. No one is very happy.
Sorry, this is difficult to explain in a comment.
I have read many of your posts, and on one occasion you were nice enough to send me an email in which you explained that money is debt. I understand that idea, but I think it flawed and outmoded. It seems so strange to me that you and so many of those who come here are deeply involved in new ways of doing things, but no one seems to think that our financial system is flawed and obsolete. But, I know that you are very busy, and I don’t want to plague any further. Thanks for your reply.
“Sorry, this is difficult to explain in a comment.”
Still, you managed to make it as clear this time as I’ve seen.
“Money is an inexhaustible national resource. So long as we spend it on worthwhile, non-inflationary projects we can go as fast as humanly possible. Money, interest rates, ROI, and the like will not matter.”
You exhibit a profound misunderstanding of so many things on so many levels that I don’t know where to start.
So I won’t
Don’t feel bad about your rudeness, I have been insulted before. But I hope you will help me to see the light. I am not saying that money is not necessary, it is. But I am saying that our current system of managing money is flawed and obsolete. Our current system is built on the idea that our supply of money is limited. I think that is incorrect. You can educate me by offering proof, not opinion, or some flip put down, that our supply of money is indeed limited. I am old enough to remember the excitement caused when we went off the gold standard in 1933. Many people predicted that this would be end of our financial system–in fact, many still think that prediction will come true. But getting off the gold standard simply increased our supply of money in a way that was acceptable to the financial systems of the developed world at the time.
Now, we are severely constrained by our lack of money to fund large scale projects that are necessary to save us from ourselves. That constraint is not natural, it is man-made, and as such, it can be changed.
So, please take the time to educate me. Give me proof that our supply of money is limited. Give me proof that our current financial system is carved in stone and is actually a natural system like the solar system is natural or photosynthesis is natural.
Don’t run away. Explain yourself. I am willing and able to go into great detail about our unlimited supply of money, and about how it would transform our world. It has always been there. Ever since humankind starting trading it was inevitable that we would one day discover it and use it for the good of all. Now is that time.
I await your reply.
“Give me proof that our current financial system is carved in stone and is actually a natural system like the solar system is natural or photosynthesis is natural.”
LOL!
“I am willing and able to go into great detail about our unlimited supply of money, and about how it would transform our world. It has always been there. Ever since humankind starting trading it was inevitable that we would one day discover it and use it for the good of all. Now is that time. ”
Money is not a real commodity. It is vaporware. It is a metric. It is a tool. A means to weigh the value of any particular resource, product, or service against all other resources, products, and services. A medium of exchange that accomodates constantly changing prices, priority usage/pricing of resources, and trade settlement.
Increasing the money supply does not increase the amount of energy, minerals, available services, etc.
If the Fed sent $1,000,000 Real Estate credits to every family in the US and Canada, we would have lots of prospective homeowners engaging in bidding wars to win the home of their dreams- raising home prices up toward the $1,000,000 mark. But again, the important point is the pricing of assets relative to each other- not the nominal price value of a particular asset or class of assets..
So what are the magical properties of money that you are referring to?
“raising home prices up toward the $1,000,000 mark”
lol — This is exactly what is happening in Seattle (and San Francisco and Vancouver BC are worse) due to the huge influx of capital (tech jobs!). The irony is the “new urbanists” view increased density as the answer to inequity and environmental problems (sprawl). The reality is that the influx of money drives the middle class (and poor/minorities) out further and further.
Growth becomes its own justification, purportedly solving problems but actually making them worse.
Currency, not money!
And what really matters is increasing rate of energy consumption by world economy. If we are able to increase this rate, we will be fine, but otherways we collapse.
money can only hold its value if there is sufficient energy in the national system to back it up
I work and produce something you need.
you buy it from me
you give me goods of similar value, or more likely “money”
I cannot eat money, therefore I must take your money and use it to acquire something I find “useful”—a loaf of bread, a steak, a gallon of petrol—-All forms of “energy”
Money therefore is merely a token of exchange. It has no intrinsic value
If I counterfeit money, my government willl throw me in jail for undermining the national currency because no form of energy exists to back it up.
If on the other hand my government counterfeits money (quantitative easing it’s called) the nation itself will ultimately collapse, because the nation does not have the levelof indigenous energy to support the money created. (instead it relies on debt and mortgaging everbodys future)
It is a law of nations—that if a nation does not produce sufficient indigenous energy with its own borders to support the aspirations of its people, then it must beg buy borrow or steal it from somewhere else, or collapse back to a median level .
there really is no escape from that black hole.
Since the beginning of time … money …
You should read up on Prof Michael Hudson’s work on ancient economies.
Or you might want to look up references to Jubilee in Leviticus, and consider why a simple ancient economy had debt cancellation built into their religion and laws.
cancel debt, and the mortgage/housing/pensions system is instantly destroyed
leviticus or whatever hadn’t thought of pensions and mortages—doesn’t work in the present day
And you’re sure that pension will be there when you retire?
On a more serious note, once inequality (debt) gets big enough, civilisations tend to fall apart.
“leviticus or whatever” was a set of rules that worked to keep a society whole for hundreds of years longer than industrial society has existed.
It was probably the result of an earlier society learning the hard way that “mortgage/housing/pensions systems” are a bad idea.
no doubt that they are a bad idea—but they are an inescapable consequence of our current mode of living
we will not voluntarily give that up
Hestal, the ‘money’ we have now is infinite already. It’s called fiat money, based on debt, acquiring infinite growth. In a finite world, ‘money’ should be finite also.
Infinite ‘money’ is what us got where we are now; in big trouble. Money for free, money for all? Guess we can skip the money part then and start handing out solar panels. For free.
There are other, very basic problems with this Hestal. If money no longer matters, who decides what nations and what classes of people get what goods/services? There is already not enough to go around for Americans; why would other countries standby idly watching America (for example) give more stuff to its citizens while others are starving? In fact America’s standard of living has a long, long ways to go down before most other countries catch up.
Furthermore your premise ignores basic geology, diminishing returns, physics, and other things. We are at peak mining for most important resources on Earth. Changing our economic system or simply removing money does nothing for peak copper mining. It isn’t going to enable us to mine asteroids or figure out a workaround for peak cheap oil. In sum, no new economic system can run a giant tractor or combine harvester.
well said.
Hey Gail, great post. I’ve mentioned this fact before but I wanted to add it again: I have spent a good amount of the summer working through a couple dozen solar projects up here in Canadia. Specifically I have been trying to un-do the complete mess that minimum-wage, unskilled installers have been making of these projects. I have three customers who are booked solid for the next six months bringing solar blocks back online after they suddenly failed due to either incorrect wiring, shoddy parts or both. Just last week I had an entire project go down because the 35 KV loadbreak elbows that were used were cheap junk and blew only six months after they were installed, so of course they call me and yell that they need it back up ASAP (but when I had quoted decent parts a few years ago when it was being built they didn’t give me the business because we were too expensive). I work with a lot of people around the world and the unfortunate aspect of so many renewable projects is that they are done improperly with second-rate parts. Because of this their life-spans are much shorter than they should be and the amount of resources that they eat up in maintenance is many times higher than most traditional power projects. This is in contrast to the nuclear generator refit project I was also working on over the summer which used high-quality parts and cable and was installed by some incredibly skilled people (shoutout to Mike from Illinois if you read this blog). The more I read of your efforts Gail and the more I see for myself in the field convince me that the renewables push is nothing but a boondoggle that has lined the pockets of a few (*disclosure: I have made some very nice comissions this year from fixing exploded solar combiner boxes and connections) at the expense of those paying for the electricity and probably shortened the time we have left of functional BAU.
Thanks for your on the ground view of what is going on.
Charlie Hall and Pedro Prieto wrote a book about what really happens with solar energy in Spain–badly installed, insects setting up shop in the wiring, problems when original manufacturer is out of business, etc. Unfortunately, nearly all studies are based on models of what is supposed to happen if everything goes right, with no thought about the grid, grid connections, or much of anything else. I understand that Pedro has been continuing to follow the story, and it keeps getting worse, at least in Spain.
I will have to take a gander at their writing, thank you for the link! I know from co-workers down in the U.S. South East (speaking specifically of Solar) that the projects there are hit and miss, some are done well while others are shoddy. I have been told by several contractors up here that a lot of the labour issues are caused by a lack of trained installers so companies bring on scads of unskilled workers from temp agencies to complete the projects on time (as their are penalty clauses for late completion). The other thing I forgot to mention is that copper theft has become endemic at these sites and even on-site security and high-end cameras are doing little to prevent the losses. I had a project last month where a former employee cut through two fences and stole a maintenance truck from the site full of 500MCM armored cable, he was caught about six kilometers away when the investigating officer saw the flames in a field from the guy trying to burn the jacket and insulation off of the cable to get at the bare copper. So in this case about $100,000.00 of cable literally went up in smoke.
Thanks for the new post.
The last 3 days spent fighting in DelusiSTAN have been exhausting….
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/uploads/cmimg_2235.jpg
I see some DelusiSTANIS followed me back through the wire…. big mistake…. I kept some ammo in reserve … just in case
.308 Winchester, I believe.
Weapon of choice…loaded with logic and fact shrapnel…. along with some rusty nails and nuts and bolts…. quite effective
http://i.cbc.ca/1.2785753.1412280692!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/iraq-crisis.jpg
Wow. An RPG that can be loaded with information warheads as well as the standard HE rounds.
You oldies are so behind the times. News is that P-utin fired a clim-ate change b=omb at the West last year. We need to know whether it was made of re’newables or not, but Gail hasn’t even mentioned it. P-utin is now gearing up to invade U-kraine, so we need some modern up-to-date information about what to do if we get n-uked. Here is some handy information on how to put out fires in your home after a nuc-lear at-tack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTesKFspWWM
Also, do please remember not to smoke after an a-ttack.
Global Supply Chains Paralyzed After World’s 7th Largest Container Shipper Files Bankruptcy, Assets Frozen
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-31/global-supply-chains-paralyzed-after-worlds-7th-largest-container-shipper-files-bank
South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping, the country’s largest shipping firm and the world’s seventh-biggest container carrier, filed for court receivership after losing the support of its banks, leaving its assets frozen as ports from China to Spain denied access to its vessels
The key take-away : “after losing the support of its banks”
All along Gail stresses a lot on the financial side of the entire mess that we are in. All it takes it just a bank that says “I don’t accept your letter of credit” and this will go south very fast.
IIRC, correct me if I am wrong – I have seen an episode of Discovery or History Channel on the 1929 bank panic. It was caused by a man (identity unknown) who walked into a bank and wanted to take all his money out because he said the bank is not strong and he has no confidence in the bank. The people lining up at other counters heard about this and started to withdraw money out. By the afternoon, the news spread and soon, everyone wants to take their money out. Imagine in 1929 without internet and mobile phones, that happened… I guess the authorities have to shut down the internet or even social media to prevent this from happening now.
The concept that I am trying to present is “the black swan” – just a small and insignificant event may be the trigger for something very large. With each passing day, the sand pile is getting bigger and bigger and more sand is being pored into the sand pile. It is just a matter of time (sooner rather than later) before it triggers an avalanche.
Exponential function –
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/images/interactive/ExpReal.gif
It gets worse over time. From the chart above, Malthus’s time may be at X-axis=0, we may be at X-axis=1. With each passing time, the curve gets steeper and steeper and the law of diminishing effects becomes greater and greater. Everything that happens is always subject to the law of diminishing returns and it is inescapable; from heroin, alcohol, central bank manipulations, EROEI, etc. There is no denying of this fact. This will go on until it it reaches a tipping point and things will go hyperbolic.
https://ltcconline.net/greenl/courses/106/explogtrig/hyperb8a.gif
I also think that a black swan will be the explosive end. The beak of the geological oil or the absolute beak of debt, for example, are theoretical places to that we go but that we are never going to reach. It is the “energy” accumulated by the diminishing returns, which inevitably will provoke the black definitive swan. And the people, will blame to this event, without understanding anything by no means. This black swan will determine to develop of the history from this point.
My apologies for my bad English. I hope you have understood.
Black Swan events are events that are totally unpredictable and it is by nature a surprise. Japan/EU/USA collapsing are not black swan events.
The failure of Hanjin or Deutsche Bank cannot fulfill their gold physically are black swan events that no one predicted (i.e. not that company or the event).
I am not sure that a black swan ends this — the central banks kills black swans as soon as they see them appear…
We saw that when the Chinese stock market started to implode some months ago. We saw it in 2008. We see it whenever any TBTF entity starts to fail.
I think the end comes when the central banks push on a string. One day – they will try something … and it will not work…
Perhaps Japan rolls out the mother of the mother of the mother of all stimulus packages — and it does nothing… (perhaps that could be referred to as a black swan?)
Confidence collapses — and the system blows to pieces….
It’s just the world’s 7th largest shipper, definitely not the end of the world as Tyler Durden would have us believe. It’s definitely a very bad sign for global demand and likely connected to deflating commodity prices. TPTB appear to be losing control and will have little power over keeping global shipping lanes open should supply chains actually collapse. All of that said, if global supply chains do collapse we would probably know within 24 hours.
Likely it will not collapse but it has struck a mortal blow to the economy. Shaken but not fallen. I would be surprised if it collapses but the financial aftershocks may be something to watch out.
see how it goes.. I still think it is unlikely to have a lot of impact…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-02/ripple-effect-could-be-tremendous-retailers-demand-government-bailout-after-hanjin-c
Interesting! I hadn’t thought about the bankruptcy of one company–Hanjin–as possibly having that much effect.
The filing created instant chaos at ports and for shippers worldwide. Creditors seized Hanjin ships. Ports denied them access. Container terminal operators refused to handle the cargo. Goods got stranded. Supply chains froze up. Crews were said to be leaving ships because they’re not getting paid.
http://wolfstreet.com/2016/09/05/hanjin-bailout-didnt-happen-shatters-complacency-major-container-carriers-immune-to-failure/
A demonstration of the potential for the world economy to stop on a dime…. this is what it looks like….
This is being fixed… but at some time there will be no fix. And the shelves will be emptied… and remain empty
Gail—-it occurred to me, as the last article seemed to reach its maximum? of 2000 replies, why not go into wordpress and wipe the first 250/500 or so of the early replies.
Would this free up the commenting system. I doubt if anyone would miss 250 early rants.
Just a suggestion
Hi Norman,
The previous post timed-out. The commenting closes after 20 days regardless of number of comments.
I agree–the problem is a timing one, not a number of comment one.
The easiest way to deal with this problem is post an Open Thread whereby comments can continue uninterrupted by any restrictions in wordpress.com.
I think an open thread would be a better option than a reposted article.
Good idea!
Do ‘whatever it takes’
Maybe in future if the article comments time out… and a new one is not ready…. would it be possible to just repost the header of the current article as a new article then allow the comments to continue?
Then delete that once a new article goes live?
Rather destructive idea. Better would be for some trusted person, like Mr Wilcox maybe, to operate a fall-back “fan club” sort of blog, and ask Gail to add a link to it, if there are temporarily no more comments that can be added to the official blog. Of course, that would raise issues of its own – would anybody want to do that? Would they have time to moderate it? Would Gail approve? Ultimately, the gap between blog posts is never huge – a two day rest from comments is maybe not a huge cross to bear.
This got me to thinking, how best to backup this important and insightful blog and its comments? Clearly, putting them on some server relies upon the internet to stay up, but for how long? We could install a back-up power system, run on a fossil fuel like tank diesel (none of that crappy intermittent alt energy for this site!). But then, if the grid fails, we will probably have other things to worry about than access to Gail’s past posts and their comments.
Probably the best back-up is for Gail to publish the blog posts as a book, with or without comments, on archival bond paper or parchment. Dmitry Orlov could be asked to this. The posts could even be printed on scrolls and placed in a sealed vault or cave for future generations to read and study, assuming there are some. That way, we can spare them from making the same mistakes we did, maybe.
“That way, we can spare them from making the same mistakes we did, maybe”
Do you mean that some future form of life…. that displays intelligence similar to that of humans… will not choose to discover fire.. or the wheel .. or electricity…. or computers… or automobiles… or airplanes… or nice homes with AC and heating — and ovens… and Lego and coffee cups… and Tylenol …. and so on …
Because they will have read the FW blog — or some other source of information explaining what happened to us….
And they will instead decide to continue to live like primitive savages…
Hardly likely. Particularly given they would not decide — their DNA would decide…
And Mr DNA wants more – he wants everything that allows him to survive and reincarnate…
He does not look at the long term picture. He does not care. More Now.
Just because it happened to us, doesn’t necessarily mean it happened to every other species or creature to have ever existed. If you believe in the mathematical probability of other worlds containing life, it’s hardly anymore of a stretch to consider the statistics of having a species that makes it past that primitive fossil fuels usage period.
Having versions printed on paper would be helpful. Need to work on that. I figure color versions are more expensive than anyone wants to buy.
Lots can be done with different tones of gray, as well as through means like different directions of lines and other graphic formations that make for distinctions without using color.
AmazonBasics Thermal Laminator
https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-PL9-US-Thermal-Laminator/dp/B00BUI5QWS
Price: $21.99
Then put a few copies into one of these – and toss them into the ocean….
http://www.alltackle.com/pelican_box.jpg
One simple low-cost possibility is to start a OFW subreddit. I’ve seen a few other blogs use this approach rather successfully.
I think the Reddit people commenting have read much less of my posts, historically, than OFW commenters, on average. This could be a problem.
Too much exposure makes FW a target for the hordes from DelusiSTAN.
Quality ,,, not quantity
Now I can see the picture much clearer
Most Progressives will be shocked to learn that fossil fuel taxes are a major source of government income. In their minds fossil fuels are heavily subsidized and we will be money ahead to curtail their use.
It is crazy to show subsidies. The nature of these subsidies varies greatly. With fossil fuels, it may help a few low income people pay their heating bills.
What is needed is a display of taxes paid, offset by subsidies against these taxes, for each type of fuel. Fossil fuels are definitely high paying, in this regard.
Fossil fuel providers are one of the few types of companies that really pay taxes, because they cannot leave the country and move to a tax haven.
Here’s a comment I posted on August 28 on the previous piece, just before the comments closed. It has relevance to this current topic:
Some news from a friend in Ittervoort, in the Netherlands.
“We had some very rough weather last night. 2 houses in the neighborhood burned down because of lightning. The lightning struck in our house too which caused short circuit in a part of the house, at that time all equipment had already been unplugged so no real damage was done. The chance that our house is being struck by lightning is higher because of the solar panels on our roof which cause static electricity (which attracts lightning). Both houses that burned down also had solar panels.”
Solar panels – Catch 22. 🙁
I noticed your comment on the previous thread. Not sure that I responded, though. I am not familiar with solar panels causing static electricity, and the static electricity leading to more lightning strikes.
I know that wind turbines have a lot of problems with lightning strikes. Wind turbine operators buy fire insurance (or perhaps it is all peril insurance) because of this problem.
We’ve got these two new power generation technologies. They’re very low carbon, have low running costs and effectively zero running fuel costs. They use mature, well understood technology that is getting cheaper all the time. They are a bit strange though in that one has output that follows a diurnal cycle while the other varies in a predictable way with the weather and can be forecast up to a week in advance. The other unusual aspect is that one of them can be deployed in large numbers of small scale installations. The other can be deployed in anything from single units all the way up to massive offshore arrays. Both of them have the potential to produce large amounts of very low carbon energy. They also have an unusual quality that while maximum capacity is variable and a little uncertain, output can be ramped up and down very fast within that.
So to really take advantage of them and to add them to the energy mix, we’ll need:-
– a smarter grid with more wide area interconnects
– energy trading across regulatory borders
– new styles of energy contract such as ultra short term, high frequency trading.
– promotion of demand management as well as supply management.
– development of processes that can quickly use excess energy when it’s available. Both industrial and residential.
Do you think we can do that? It means changes to business as usual and the incumbents won’t like that. So the answer is as much political as technical.
—
A lot of the objections you highlight in this article arise because we’re trying to shoehorn the new technologies into existing technical and business environments. Suggesting that to really take advantage of their benefits we’ll have to change the systems to suit them.
It costs a huge amount to do what you want to do.
One of the things we want to do is keep banks open. We would like them to know our bank balances, so we can take money out when needed. One of the details of the new smaller system is that it is not likely to be able to do simple things that we want, like keep banks operating and the Internet operating. It is likely to be a very different world.
Going backward doesn’t work. Trying to transition to a system we can support looks like it will be very difficult.
Irrespective of what you would like to do you have a starting point of the present industrial and consumer loads and these follow a reasonably well defined pattern.
From that you can decide where things might move with financial incertives.
Solar electricity and wind generation are two different resources. In some ways the only commonality is the marginal cost of electricity. At present there is no cost-effective way of storing electricity, and few consumers are willing to cut consumption even if paid to do so.
It looks like the next step is some kind of smart billing system, but the infrastructure probably won’t get built in time.
Hi Gail, sorry to hear of your loss. My condolences in what is obviously a very stressful time.
I’m working on a report for the UK, I’ve emailed separately about a link to your work.
Regarding your latest post, I’ll mention that the UK had 15% wind TWh in 2015, and at first sight most of the grid problems seem to stem from a lack of foresight and planning.
I expect a lack of money goes in with the lack of foresight and planning. Usually, the chosen way is close to the least expensive way.
For intermittent renewable, the transmission lines need to be quite high capacity, compared to the amount transmitted, on average, since the lines are called to transfer spikes in electricity supply. This makes the cost of the lines higher than they would otherwise be per kWh of electricity transferred.
I’d guess that 60% of the problems come from a lack of forethought by the civil service on how the incentives will work or can be gamed. One of the reasons the UK has so much wind power is that they got subsidised for being renewable, and then got carbon certificates that approximately doubled the subsidy (unintended).
I’d suggest that Hawaii could have made better use of geothermal. I would suspect vested interests at work somewhere along the line. Burning that much oil seems crazy, but I haven’t looked at the numbers.
That is a good point about incentives being “gamed” to produce more benefit than the original authors expected. Also, there are so many different groups offering incentives that the situation gets very confused.
Regarding geothermal, there is a difference between the “devil you know and the devil you don’t know.” This is an article I found about it from 2013. http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/geothermal-is-a-red-hot-topic/ I also visited the Hawaii Puma Geothermal Plant a few years ago, when I visited the island to speak to a couple of groups.
Geothermal in Hawaii is available from hot mountains–in other words where there is volcanic activity. These mountains are not near cities, where the electricity is needed. So to make better use of geothermal, more electric transmission would be needed. Adding the electric transmission is one barrier.
Another issue (at least when I visited the geothermal plant there) was that the early geothermal plant produced the same quantity of electricity day and night. Hawaii has very little need for electricity at night, because it has very little industry, and because it does not use electricity for heating or cooling, to any significant extent. The early hydrothermal plant already produced as much electricity as they needed at night. A newer design under consideration for an expansion offers more variable supply. According to the link, if this proposed expansion is actually added, it will bring output up to 50% of the Big Island’s maximum electricity demand.
One issue in Hawaii has been that the native religion considers the mountains sacred, so there is objection to drilling on this ground.
Another issue the article mentions is a problem with relatively frequent accidental hydrogen sulphide emissions in Hawaii, because the hot steam contains H2S. This makes it unpopular with nearby neighbors.
A February 2016 article http://hawaiitribune-herald.com/news/local-news/uh-cancels-hualalai-geothermal-projects says that the company that was selected as the low bidder on the expansion project decided to withdraw, 12 months after it was awarded the contract. The contract pricing was at 12 cents per kWh. A first guess (by me) is that as they proceeded on the project, they figured out that they had vastly underbid the project, and needed to cut their losses.
This is a Feb 2016 talking about the University of Hawaii canceling a Jualalai geothermal projects, due to lack of funding and local opposition. http://hawaiitribune-herald.com/news/local-news/uh-cancels-hualalai-geothermal-projects I presume this is a different proposed geothermal project.
Thanks for that. Some of the data seems odd. In recent years Iceland has planned and built geothermal plants in preference to hydro. Their costs are of the order of US$0.04 per KWh if bitcoin miners are to be believed. Links:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=333720.0
https://www.islandsbanki.is/library/Skrar/Geothermal-Reports/%C3%8Dslenski-Orkumarka%C3%B0urinn-SkyrlsaENSKAN_2.pdf
I have been to Iceland as well. The situation there is very different. In Iceland, geothermally heated hot water is pretty much everywhere. It is like very widespread hot springs. The hot tap water in hotels smells of sulphur, but that seems to be OK with them–they are not trying to impress people from distant lands with their wonderful scenery.
Geothermal in Hawaii involves trying to tap heat from deep within a distant volcano, using special wells. I expect that they can use the hot water directly in Iceland, while they use some sort of injection and production well arrangement in Hawaii. The EIA talks about different kinds of geothermal power plants. http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=geothermal_power_plants Geothermal can be used with a lot of different temperature differences. In its many forms, it is really a very different “product,” with different costs and different life expectancy (before the geothermal energy cools).
Gail –
Wonderful post, thank you so much! It suggests something that I’ve been thinking for a long time, and that is that our ability to produce intermittent renewable electricity outstrips our ability to produce high-density, high-power, and easy-to-build storage.
My presentation at DragonCon this Sunday will illustrate what kind of storage it would take to level out supply and demand between solar PV and a real-world power consumption curve representing the US Southeast states over an entire year. If we carve up Stone Mountain and the granite underneath into a flywheel 1.2km long and 1km across, we *can* do it provided that a 900-million-ton piece of rock can whirl at 24RPM. The most surprising thing I’ve learned from running the modeling behind this is that transfer efficiency of the flywheel has a very strong influence on the oversupply factor you’d need to keep the flywheel spinning year-round (alarmingly, that is the case no matter how fancilful or ordinary the storage method is!!!); I’m coming up with a oversupply factor lower bound of about twelve given a transfer efficiency of 90% (not out of line for a motor or generator). To power the SE US from this solar-PV-plus-flywheel arrangement, because of the oversupply factor you’d need a solar farm about 300 miles on a side. And as to the question of what the equivalent battery storage would have to be, state-of-the-art batteries would form a cube 625m on a side, so, same order of magnitude but acknowledging that for any given stored energy (within reason) there’s a spin rate the flywheel can assume to match it. But guess which storage method you wouldn’t have to fight a “lithium war” over?
Wow! Those are quite some numbers. It is very hard to make the story work–just too much oversupply/undersupply problem.
You must live close to me–or at least travel to the Atlanta area.
Indeed; I live in Lilburn and have been working for GT/CEPL since 2013.
I am in Kennesaw, near KSU.
Jeff, tell me about the bearing that holds up that 900 million ton of rock.
Power satellites offer some of the advantages of nuclear plants, steady production of power, but they have the same problem as renewables in that it makes no sense to turn them off. If they grow to become more than the base load, you can shut them off, but it’s a better solution to figure out something useful to do with the excess power.
Making hydrogen seems like the best use of the excess power, but it does get tricky. Unless the hydrogen plant is run a substantial fraction of the time, the capital is poorly used. It’s a similar problem to the high cost transmission lines that are intermittently used.
I understand that the new regulations in Germany don’t let those who are involved in selling electricity to the grid at auction do anything useful with the electricity that is curtailed. This is a problem, because some of them have ideas regarding ways that this otherwise-lost electricity could be put to use.
I have posted this before (21st July 2016) but maybe some of new the people have not read it. We are way past the “deflationary” event horizon; it does not help the present situation at all :
Let us do a thought experiment. Let us say right now, today we announce that we have manage to find an oil field that is 10 times the size of Ghawar, invented thorium reactor, space-based power, harvesting deep sea methane or any of the large “currently-pie-in-the-sky-project” that allows us to have unlimited supply of energy. What will happen? Are we going to get any better? Is Deutsche Bank going to be safe? How about the bad loans in Italy or Japan? How would that help in getting the people to spend more? Does that help in reducing employment? Even if we manage to get the super-sized Ghawar online right now, it will only drop the prices of crude oil even further. If Japan manages to harvest methane and it is so cheap, does it mean that the debt will disappear? Are they going to double their sale of Lexus or Toyotas ? If they sell half price (because energy is too cheap to meter now), would it cause a massive deflation at the other side of the world like Ford or GM? Are there going to be a lot of consumers of the new-found energy source? Who has the money to buy things when their pensions are shrunk or their purchasing power have shrunk ?
What we have is lots of commodities. What we don’t have is time and a solution to the financial mess that we are in. This financial mess is caused by the fact that we have low EROEI. We are way past the event horizon and even if we are given a special “zero-point” energy source, it will not help us in the immediate future. Even if you want to use that new oil for space travel, is it feasible to do it in such a short period of time and what will that do to the debts that has been piled up? Ask Japan to write off and what happened to all the pension funds? One man’s debt is another man’s assets. You cannot have it both ways.
You are right, we are very much up against limits. At the same time, we have been having a hard time understanding the timing. We don’t know anything other than to continue in the direction we are going in. It is reasonable to investigate more in the same direction.
One way a person learns is by talking to others who are working the field. This is one reason I keep up contacts with people who are working on approaches which may be “pie in the sky.” They may be low in probability, but if there is some minute chance of their idea working, and I can learn from them, I sometimes find it worthwhile to keep up contacts with these people.
You could mine bitcoins with the excess.
“You could mine bitcoins with the excess.”
That’s a thought.
I was hoping that you might pull in a power systems and/or transmission engineer familiar with the latest technologies to assist with the heavy lifting of this very complex topic. Alas, many of the assumptions you make are far out of date and OBE. It is unclear why you continue to attack the renewables sector in the manner you do.
For more detailed treatment of this topic, please start with the link below;
“an all-sector wind, water, and solar energy economy can run with no load loss over at least 6 y, at low cost. As discussed in SI Appendix, Section S1.L, this zero load loss exceeds electric-utility-industry standards for reliability. ”
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15060.full
There are many other such references if you care to dig deeper in this area.
Thanks for the link. Most of the references I have looked at take only one part of the problem. Even when they take more of the problem, they seems to miss important connections. I am connecting with some others involved with these issues. It is necessary to look at real world data, and see how slow the ramp up is in practice, to really appreciate the problems involved.
I’d suggest that a look at the demand over a 24 hour period, one for winter, and one for summer would explain a lot. See here for downloads eg
http://www2.nationalgrid.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=8589934640
http://www2.nationalgrid.com/uk/Industry-information/Electricity-transmission-operational-data/Data-Explorer/
When you see a graph of wind energy supplied over say, 1 month, and compare with UK demand there is an obvious mismatch. Similarly, the difference between UK day and UK night demand is about 5GW summer and maybe 15GW winter, say 30%, and remember some bits of the UK are close to the arctic circle, no not much daylight in winter, there’s a clear limit to what can be achieved with renewables alone.
It’s interesting to get another virewpint on all this stuff. Thanks.
That paper cited by Will Stewart pretty much blows Tverberg’s article out of the water. Its hard not to go with the peer reviewed PNAS paper versus an opinion piece by a non-expert….
Paper refuses nothing. Check out the recent history of Concentrated Solar Power before rushing to judgement.
You obviously haven’t read many peer reviewed articles. There are lots of problems–too narrow focus, recycling of wrong results from the past, not really understanding past results.
I do write some peer reviewed articles, and I act as peer reviewer for some other peer reviewed articles.
I write articles because I think something needs to be figured out and presented, not because my job depends on my publishing a certain number of peer reviewed articles per year–each of which are necessarily very narrow, in order to meet this requirement. You will notice that there were a lot of links and graphs in my article. The graphs I made you are likely not to find anywhere else.
You are talking to someone with 80+ plus peer reviewed papers in immunological and microbiological journals in a 20 odd year career, and to someone who has been an editor on a couple of international journals so please spare me the ‘you obviously haven’t read many peer reviewed articles’ BS. Perhaps when you get an article printed in PNAS (as referred to above) I might take your protestations seriously, but until then, not so much. You have interesting stuff to say Gayle, but not really on this topic. You are out of your depth.
And which part, precisely, of the paper has any relevance to the subject under discussion?
Andy Hamiltons are ten a penny. So which one would you be, Andy? The comedian and game show panelist? The comedy writer and producer? The President of Oxford University? The naval commander? Or one of the numerous bottle washers and button counters who go by that name?
Inquiring minds would like to know, so that we can make up our own minds as to whether you are qualified to blow your own trumpet as pompously as you do.
Personally, I’m leaning towards the naval commander on the basis of that colourful metaphor—”pretty much blows Tverberg’s article out of the water”.
It’s difficult to accept that you have ever worked as a journal editor since the very first rule in that trade is to make sure you spell other people’s names correctly. It’s Gail, not Gayle. And the second rule, particularly in academic journals is to communicate in a polite and friendly manner, especially so if you wish to register disagreement with somebody.
Once we get you properly identified and we’re satisfied that you are not Andy Hamilton the murder accomplice, or Andy Hamilton the psychiatric hospital inmate, but THE Andy Hamilton—immunologist microbiologist, rodent torturer and Renaissance man—then we may condescend to examine whether your qualifications oblige us to take seriously your cartoonishly supercilious opinion on Gail’s work.
You are aware that if something is not real now but you are certain that it will be real in 30 years…. means you are exhibiting delusional thinking.
It’s like me saying I can prove now that in 30 years I will be able to grow a potato out of the top of my head.
In Thirty Years… In Thirty Years….. sing along everyone …. tap your toes….
My Next Thirty Years
😉
“It’s like me saying I can prove now that in 30 years I will be able to grow a potato out of the top of my head.”
LOL!!!!
………………………………………………………………………
I request comprehension on the part of you and forgive me for my interference. Peak oil is a solitary place. The things have not changed into the province DelusiSTAN-Spain. They all remain drugged by the magic of a Druid. It is frightening. The intelligent discussion in the province finally has collapsed. RealiSTAN has lost the battle in this province. Day 1-Sep-2016.
This night, I will sing this nice song together with my dear beings.
“Kumaya-baby TV”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_SelXqVLt0
I am sorry 🙁
This is a beautiful video. It looks like a vision of our common global village future Utopia especially for kids. Gotta catch their imaginations while they’re young. And make no mistake, I think it is essential to teach children to appreciate that all of us are “brothers and sisters under the skin” and to play down national, racial and ethnic divisions. They are going to run into plenty of the latter as they grow up.
Of course racism is abhorrent, a poison heart. I had not noticed the video-positive racial component. It was a joke for his extreme naivete.
You have touched a thorny issue: how we educate our children with the arrival of the collapse of the world in which they live? We say: children, prepare for the fight and perhaps to death !. Obviously, this is unacceptable to our ‘civilized’ minds, but it might be as honest with them. What are the ideals and morals that must pursue? Do the universal rights of humanity… love for their homeland… their own survival and that of your family …? Which?
Difficult question. I have not yet found the answer.
Crates
What do I have to consume regularly in order to inhabit this beautiful world permanently?
Patxaran doesn’t seem to work.
Saludos
Xabier
Xabier
“What do I have to consume regularly in order to inhabit this beautiful world permanently?”
uhhh … the truth, I do not know what to say. If the pacharán does not work, try with the Soberano 🙂
http://cloud10.todocoleccion.online/botellas-antiguas/tc/2010/01/20/17065552.jpg
Un saludo amigo.
Just to fill in some gaps.
The data I linked to earlier shows some interesting trends. Looking at the daily summer load pattern (UK England and Wales) shows a near step difference between day and night. (Monday 29 June 2015 22620 – 35948 trough to peak) Then 8.7GW of installed solar PV delivers during daylight peaking at 5.9GW. Which results in the camel looking somewhat more like a dromedary, with not much attenuation of the morning and evening peaks. This is where the figures need further work. I’d expect that the system would use pumped storage (hydo) to attenuate these peaks – around 7GW peak would be perfect, but that doesn’t seem to happen, that supply seems to come when the loads are much lighter, sometimes at midnight.
The figures do not give the complete UK picture – Scotland is missing and there will be a lot of wind energy from there, and maybe pumped storage.
The takeaway from this is that the UK could usefully increase its solar PV, but also needs to increase its pumped or other hydo storage. At a guess, up to 2GW of CSP electricity would be useful in offsetting the evening peak demand.
Wind generated electricity is another story.
Just to put my throwaway comment into perspective a new 7GW hydro dam would be fifth biggest in the world, so the UK is doing very well with close to 2GW to work with.
Just as a stopgap measure, I’ll throw some thoughts on wind generated electricity out here. IF you are willing to pay 2-3 times as much for your electricity as at present, and for residential consumers, to be cut off for 24 hours two or three times during the winter, it would be much easier to get renewables to work for a community.
It still wouldn’t solve the fuel problem for trucks and aircraft BTW.
Synthetic fuel can be made from electric, air and water. The question is the cost.
see https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Oil-Gas-Methanol-Economy/dp/3527324224
Also useful for the back up generator when the wind does not blow.
I estimate $10/gallon (gasoline equivalent). So still plenty of Manhattanites vacationing in Europe but fewer postpersons vacation iing in Europe.
Now imagine you operated an economy … with factories… and you had to compete with other countries to make widgets… but your power costs twice as much … and on some days you have no power at all…
With intermittent, high cost electricity, I suppose you could make goods only for yourself, using whatever resources you happen to have locally. But that would be a pretty limited number of types of goods. Probably no metals or plastics.
“This paper couples numerical simulation of time- and space-dependent weather with simulation of time-dependent power demand, storage, and demand response to provide low-cost solutions to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of WWS across all energy sectors in the continental United States between 2050 and 2055.”
Yes indeed…. and I am predicting that by 2020 if BAU is still alive —- I will have perfected my sheep / solar panel hybrid programme…. and each time this yr in New Zealand…. the solar lambs will be born….
I will then position them in the sunniest paddock and our energy woes will be over.
Unlike your programme I actually have a prototype up and running … primitive yes… but nevertheless… what do you have?
http://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2016/07/sheepcamera-800×568.jpg
Anything is possible — particularly if you indicate a 30+ year time frame….for it to happen.
In case you have not been following FW…. oil is the problem — not electricity so much…
And a solution is required like right now… unless of course you believe that the central banks can keep BAU alive for 3+ decades longer….
Will was a regular commenter on The Oil Drum. He was convinced that renewables would save us, back them.
As I looked over the article, I wondered where they really planned to get all of the materials that they needed for the new system. We have may problems going on simultaneously.
Let’s dig Johnny Cash up and inject him with stem cells – and see if we can get one last song out of him…. (lyrics courtesy Fast Eddy Country Music Division – Royalties apply….)
In thirty years, In thirty years…
It will all happen….
In thirty years..
Now go to sleep
Do no fret
All will be well…
In thirty years…
Turn out the lights
Go grab a beer
The world is saved…
In thirty years….
Will, you state “hoping that you might pull in a power systems and/or transmission engineer” and then you link to a paper from a civil engineer, Mark Jacobson, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Precourt Institite for Energy (that being, Jay Precourt http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Jay_A._Precourt). You may find interesting what the co-directors of Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy have to say, they don’t seem to be on board with Jacobson https://energy.stanford.edu/from-directors/deep-decarbonization-electricity-grid-opportunities-and-challenges . Here’s a detailed analysis of Jacobson’s plans form an actual power systems and electrical engineer http://tinyurl.com/gov9mtg
Thanks for the links.
It seems like most academics specialize so narrowly that they are not aware what researchers a few doors down from them are saying. They know that they can get research grants on subjects that are politically popular–for example, how we can prevent climate change with intermittent renewables–without ever thinking about whether it is really feasible.
You have gutted the troll – well done
Hey Todd, the (tiny) link for the analysis (rebuttal I presume) does not work for me. Can you post a good one? Also, I don’t see any apparent disagreement between the article you linked and the paper. It seems like the purpose of the paper is to show what is possible for 2050 and argue for that path (vs the BAU 2050 approach). The purpose of the article seems to be to highlight our current intolerance for RE and how that can be improved for the future. If we were to push strongly on the approaches raised in the article you linked (going beyond even what they advocate/explain), it may be possible to achieve what the paper describes by 2050.
Here’s the cleaned link: http://www.timothymaloney.net/Critique_of_100_WWS_Plan.html
It is the graph of a future projection more ludicrous that I have seen in my life!
It is difficult work to understand that there are experts who think that this thing is possible.
http://www.timothymaloney.net/Critique_of_100_WWS_Plan_files/Figure%205,%20zoomed.jpg
The darker grey area I can believe in.
The person drawing that chart had a great imagination and little grasp of how the world really works. I expect human population goes to zero someplace very early in that chart.
Here’s another critique of Jacobson’s plan for USA http://www.theenergycollective.com/willem-post/2264202/reducing-us-primary-energy-wind-and-solar-energy-and-energy-efficiency
Willem Post is originally from Germany. He has been analyzing the situation for a long time now. He takes an engineering point of view in figuring out amounts. I have corresponded with him various times over the years.
I have posted this early June, feel free to check and counter check and tell me if it is wrong.
MYTH 1: Renewables will save us
SOLAR
=====
Typical solar panel size is 5’x3′. Let us make 5’x5’ as the other 2’ people doing maintenance work. We can line up end to end and side-by-side. The 5′ length will stretch for hundreds of panel. The 3′ will be placed side by side (total 6′) and another 4′ as walkway for maintenance. The typical output is 200W per panel.
So, I assume that that we will have sufficiently strong sunlight for 10 hours a day (very optimistic assumption). That will make 1 solar panel producing 2kWh per day
WIND
====
See the links below. The bigger the rotor, the bigger the power, the higher the complexity and there a greater chances of failure. Let us stick to the smallest. 10m rotor diameter generating 25kW. Let us give extremely generous 20-hour wind availability. So, each turbine will be 500kWh.
POINTS TO NOTE
==============
1. Intermittency is a big problem. The link http://www.wind-power-program.com/powerprofile.htm shows you how intermittent the winds are at “good locations”. Let us not dwell in locations that are not good. Good locations are usually very far away from civilization.
2. At night, solar panel is useless. Furthermore, you need someone to clean the panels as dusts can lower efficiency. Forget about automated clenaing systems. It is too complex to maintain and prone to failure. The best is to get a guy to sweep the panels everyday. With thousands of panels, a small efficiency loss is a big deal.
IRON SMELTING
=============
It takes about 6000kWh (See link below. I take the average number) to melt and make (produce) one (1) metric ton of iron from iron ore. This is not even steel but iron only.
You need 6000/2=3000 solar panels or 6000/500=12 small wind turbines and run for one full day (daylight hours for solar and 20 hours for wind). Spread out for 3000 solar panels (5’x5′), you need 275′ x 275′ land area. This is the power needed to smelt 1 ton of iron (based on theoretical calculation with no efficiency losses)
For commercially viable mini steel mills. It can produce 200,000 tons per year. Due to cost consideration and economies of scale, that is the smallest amount. Anything less than 200k tons per year is economically unfeasible. 200,000/365=55 tons per day. Therefore, we need 55×6000=330,000kWh/day of electricity. That will be 330,000/2=166,500 solar panels. Spread out, you need a square of 600m x 600m of land just to power one small iron mill. I am assuming the size of iron mills are the same as steel mills. This is not steel but iron. Referring to the link below, you need additional processing and energy to get from iron to steel. Some points to note:
1. The land used for solar cannot be used for agriculture.
2. Assume that the land is flat. Levelling the land uses a lot of energy as well
3. How about the inverters, distribution centers?
4. High current (amperage) is required for steel manufacturing. How are you going to “gather” all the current electricity, stored it and put it quickly to the steel mill when they require that blast of current to melt the iron? Capacitors? batteries? Solar power generates small amount of voltages and the current is small. It is mean for charging or “low-power” usage like lighting, computer, fan. It is totally unsuitable for high current types like smelting, stamping, machines, industrial-strength type of use at the factory.
5. Sure, we can put solar panels in the desert, how about transmission lines (especially maintaining them)?
6. This energy usage does NOT include preparing the furnace (it must NOT be cooled down and must be continuously processed 24 hours a day), the pre and post processing of iron (separating iron ore, hammering, shaping). It does not include transportation, the power used for conveyor belts, the computer systems, the lighting, the cafeteria food preparation, etc.
7. How many of the 166,500 panels needs to be replaced daily. Cracked, hit by hail, birds, stones, damaged, short circuit?
8. We can only run the mills during daylight. We cannot use it at night or when it rains or overcast. Cool down the furnace and heat up again the following day? How much extra power is required. Batteries? How soon you need to change them when mills are running 24-hours a day? That means you need to double the solar panels where one half is used to charge up the battery? 600m x 600m land becomes 600m x 1200m land just for one steel mill?
9. Getting someone to clean 166,500 panels is a great challenge.
10. I am assuming 200W and there is no degradation of panels over a period of time.
11. Let us not talk about spare parts for the solar panel, wires/cables, controllers, converters, transformers (to make it high current), etc.
12. Yes, government can force lower-sized mills and other forced nationalized projects but just refer to USSR’s collective farm and factories for the consequences of government control.
** That is just for one small iron mill. There are hundreds of mills worldwide.
The same goes for windfarm. We need 330,000/550=600 small wind turbines just to support one small iron mill.
From http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-of-materials.html , you can see that to make 1kg of electronic grade Si, it takes about 2 MWh. This figure is not verified but I am not surprised as semiconductor is a very power intensive industry. I am also not sure how many solar panels can be made from 1kg of silicon but I guess not many. 2MWh is about 2000/2=1000 panels. You need 1000 panels, working 10 hours a day to provide energy to make 1kg of electronic-grade silicon. That is an irony.
**Will someone say iron mills are not required for modern civilization ….. ??? **
MYTH 2 : Well, I can work from home using internet and I don’t have to travel ……
Datacenter electricity usage in US only (not worldwide) as per http://www.computerworld.com/article/2598562/data-center/data-centers-are-the-new-polluters.html – 91 billion kWh per year in 2013 or 249,315,068 kWh per day. That translate to 124,657,534 solar panels needed (working 10 hours a day) or close to 500,000 small wind turbines (10m rotor) working 20 hours a day. If you put 124,657,534 in a square grid, that will be 16.7km (10miles) each side. Just think of how many replacement parts you need for 124,657,534 5’x3′ panels. You need to think of how you can transmit the power to all the datacenters in USA when the power transmission system in any country is crumbling. How many people you are going to employ to maintain, change the panels, inverters, cables, clean the panels?
Now, how about residential, mega factories and other “modern civilization” critical facilities that requires tons of electricity?
Are we going towards “using solar-powered” machines to combined CO2, water and air to form hydrocarbons that will be used as fuel for planes? We cannot have battery-powered airplanes…..
Sources:
Solar panel sizes and output : http://brightstarsolar.net/2014/02/common-sizes-of-solar-panels/
Wind turbine : http://www.wind-power-program.com/powerprofile.htm
Wind turbine : http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-power4.htm
Energy to make 1kg of material : http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-of-materials.html
Steel mills : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_mill
Can solar power gigantic dredges, excavators or other “civilization-required” machines that are large and requires large amount of energy (ships? Trains?)
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H0MQQ_rVpQM/UDARzKQic9I/AAAAAAAACqI/RB974StPmPs/s1600/Bagger_288_World's_Largest_Digging_Machine_Krupp_Germany1.jpg
I am an engineer (electrical) by training and I fail to understand how batteries from PV or wind turbines can power these behemoths”
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H0MQQ_rVpQM/UDARzKQic9I/AAAAAAAACqI/RB974StPmPs/s1600/Bagger_288_World's_Largest_Digging_Machine_Krupp_Germany1.jpg
Some will point out that Denmark has a lot of windfarms – does the country have a lot of steel mills or any form of critical industry? They import it. If we were to isolate Denmark, will it survive? So, who is going to smelt the steel, produce microchips, food, glass, clothes or even toothbrush for Denmark? They can “go green” because the energy-intensive industries are not there in Denmark
Thanks again for this — outstanding work!
The electricity generation in Denmark is less than 5% of Germany’s electricity generation. It is an energy importer, being situated next to Norway and Sweden, both with a lot of cheap hydroelectric, as well as Germany. Having all of the wind turbines is getting to be a more and more expensive hobby, as far as I can see. It would be cheaper just to buy electricity from all of the neighbors with electricity to sell.
Re wind power, you said, “Let us stick to the smallest. 10m rotor diameter generating 25kW.” By modern grid electricity generating standards, that’s a toy. You’re basing your analysis on something a factor of 5-15 out.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design
Typical modern wind turbines have diameters of 40 to 90 metres (130 to 300 ft) and are rated between 500 kW and 2 MW. As of 2014 the most powerful turbine, the Vestas V-164, is rated at 8 MW and has a rotor diameter of 164m.
OK. I am out by a factor of 15. So instead of 600 wind turbines, we need 40 very large wind turbines just to power a small steel mill. Add in another 10 wind turbines for the rollers, hammer and other supporting equipment (computers, servers, cafeteria, lighting, etc). That is we assume a 20-hour wind availability and near 100% efficiency.
My small steel plant needs 330 MWh. Assume full 24 hour wind, each one is 2MW. So, 48MWh per turbine. We need at least 7 wind turbines running non-stop just to have enough energy to smelt the iron (theoretical calculations).
http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/12/Wind-Turbines-Windmill-Farm.jpg
On a grand scale of things, you still need natgas, coal or nuclear to do the heavy lifting
“we need 40 very large wind turbines just to power a small steel mill”
Shall we add at the end of that ‘intermittently’
Let’s say on Tuesday the wind does not blow …. the workers at Factory A get paid for playing cards while they wait for the wind….
On Friday same….
On average let’s say 5 days a month… the wind does not blow….
Let’s say the factory produces automobiles for BMW
The efficiency of the factory is dramatically impacted by these power outages….
This results in costs rising … let’s say 12%.
BMW could moan and the government would then build a new power plant as back up for when the wind does not blow – coal-fired…
This would jack electricity rates through the roof (operating two systems) resulting in costs rising … let’s say 14%
Factory B uses coal fired plants to provide electricity almost never has power outages…
It can produce BMW autos for at least 12% less than the wind powered factory…
Factory A will soon look like this
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b6/33/2f/b6332f6bf73fc677911c2cc9de2e9971.jpg
Will, Mark Jacobson is known for being way over optimistic. He also doesn’t give serious consideration to what is proposals cost. You might also note that “peer review” at PNAS isn’t always what you think it is.
When you see someone like Tim Morgan lose his mind and start babbling on about BAU Lite scenarios….
What conclusion can one come to other than — when the fire in the kitchen gets too hot — it drives some people out of their minds with despair.
DelusiSTANIS can smell despair…. as sharks smell blood…. when despair is in the air …. the DelusiSTANIS gather…. and they go into a frenzy flinging clods of hopium (that’s the stuff they put in the pipe… in its original form it resembles honey…) …
Those in despair cannot help but taste the hopium — it is pure at this point so extremely addictive … then they want more… and MORE…. AND MORE…
They BEG for it…. where can I get MORE of this fine substance????
Of course the DelusiSTANIS then tell them of the fabled land where Hopium is as plentiful as water in the Pacific Ocean….
Then they direct them to the gate with the sign indicating ‘Welcome to DelusiSTAN – Home of Hopium’
And when they go through those gates… they are lost….
Tim Morgan is lost…. Will whatever your name is…. you are lost…
I’m surprised to hear Tim Morgan is falling for delusions about what is to come. Heinberg, Martenson and even JHK lately seem to have glimpsed into the abyss and quickly averted their eyes.
Waffle about resilience, transition towns,permaculture, veggie gardens and chooks in every yard etc.
The reality of over 8 billion people needing to be fed, housed, clothed and employed when fossil fuel energy is withdrawn is catastrophic. In my experience few folk can handle this fact. Understandable really.
David Barnes, Sydney.
I wonder if they really believe this…
Or if they just want to sell books… books that end with the extinction of the species… will have a limited audience…
@David & FE
Kunstler, Heinberg & Martenson have a all business model! Als as FE says all three sell books.
Gail tries to always deeper analyze our surrounding systems and their dependencies and inter-relatedness. Gail does not sell anything. I don’t know where she gets all the energy and her drive – but I hope that the OFW site and the commenters help her to realize that her work is very much appreciated, even if the comments here sometimes are a bit off-topic 😉
In contrast: Kunstler & Heinberg sell books, Martenson in addition membership at ‘PP’ + seminars – in effect all sell ‘hopium’…. that there is a way out… a kind of “A good life”.
In light of what may of the commenters here think our predicament is – that is totally fine with me. Hope is better than despair for most. Not very many people can handle that what many here believe is the way things will finally go.
It goes without saying that Gail stands alone as the most important analyst in this space… the rest either don’t get it — or have sold out to sell a few books…
If a reset were possible then in a hundred years Gail would be ‘Thomas Malthus’ — except that she got the timing and all the details right…. FW articles would be poured over in university lecture rooms….
Alas… there will be no reset.. no Enlightenment … only darkness… cold, grim, horrific… darkness…
BOO!
books are basically a hobby in this genre
maybe there are exceptions, and i’m just a small fish in this particular pond but i don’t think anyone makes enough to make writing worthwhile.
kuntsler has said as much and published figures awhile back to prove it
Makes sense… so we are left concluding that they actually believing their clap trap…
So here we are … on this tiny, virtual island…. in a vast sea of delusion and ignorance
the preface of my book says:
We hope the problem will go away.
It might—but I doubt it
There will be a limited audience alright. At least most on this site agree about that. I agree we all favour hope over despair but it’s a poor strategy for dealing with predicaments. On this note the question remains hanging..what can be done?
The answer from Meadows. ” there is nothing we could do”. Sums it up nicely.
Your right. Eat, drink and be merry. Sigh.
David Barnes, Sydney.
@David
The answer from Meadows: ”there is nothing we could do”
To avert the cliff / breakdown – yes, that is my conclusion, too. We could prolong the game or change things in our local socio-economic arrangement but not the dynamic the world or global-instrtrial-and-people-growth-economy has taken.
Still, the timing and the dynamic for the cliff is still open and debatable. And that’s whats keeps me reading and posting here!
@Norman
“don’t think anyone makes enough to make writing worthwhile.”
From that does Kunstler and Heinberg life? I don’t think painting or speaking?!? Hmm….
Martenson may have enough subscribers and past investment to sustain his living. But when I sometimes see which people become time at his web site (e.g. Mike Maloney) – then I question more and more his economic sanity. I don’t mean that Martenson has it not very much right or figured out… but I think even he has still subconscious things going on which advert him of realizing the big – big picture or the full extend of our possible predicament.
Kuntsler recently published an actual monthly return on his writing. It was more than mine but still peanuts—(I’m left with the shells)
i don’t know what he actually lives on.
Gigolo fees?
Wonder what the going rate is for Hopium these days… it’s in great demand
Kunstler currently gets over $3000 per month from his patreon page. Nice work if you can get it!
@Yorchichan
Thanks for the info – didn’t know something like that existed. It’s good stuff – I myself support 2 other bloggers via subscriptions to additional stuff (podcasts, infos) which I don’t really need, but do – since I appreciate their general work which I don’t wanna miss as their found a big part of their living on that model.
Further down on the “patreon” page Kunstler states, that: “I pull in about $3,000 a year in total royalties from some of my more recent books”… not very much indeed.
With those sorts of numbers Howard must collect food stamps with all the other riff raff and the black people that he is constantly moaning about.
@Ert
I’m not knocking JHK; everybody has to make a living. RE has a link on the diner to a good article on the impossibility of extricating oneself from our destructive money system.
Sorry to hear of your family’s loss.
My husband and I will be attending the funeral tomorrow. Autopsy was inconclusive. Seems to have been some heart-related problem.
Thanks for new post, Gail
I understand this one was quite a lot of work to put together.
They all are, but electricity has difficulties of its own. It is necessary to go through a lot of material, in different directions, to figure out which pieces are most important and also not miss too much. The units are less familiar, too, so it is easier to make a mistake on labels to graphs.
Gail, great post but you will receive a lot of “flak” for this. Sorry to hear about the loss. Take care and best wishes..
I could have named the article, “Intermittent renewables won’t work.” I would have gotten more readers, and a lot more flack.
How about Who were the Idiots that approved the German Alternative Energy Plan?
I can’t imagine the flak flingers will stick around for very long….
No, they make their own websites like Robert Scribbler where he’s free to simply delete any post that challenges his delusional views of how he personally believes we can stop climate change by driving electric vehicles and using solar panels. I keep asking him who is supplier is but I believe he’s banned my IP from the comments section.
Digital DelusiSTANs….
Dear Tango Oscar;
You may never utter a syllable that may be construed as “negative”, or “doomerish” on Mr. Fanney’s site. My IP was blocked when i tried to get him to admit that eliminating CO2 discharges during this century would mean changing our lifestyle. Nope, says he, infinite growth on a finite planet is perfectly possible so long as everyone like Wendy from Peter Pan just believes.
Yours in Doom,
Pintada
It does Scribbler his own harm. People are going to encounter the information he puts out there and suddenly realize it may be inaccurate considering Mr. Fanney is incapable of understanding that natural gas and coal mostly power the electrical grid. Anyone touting electric cars as a solution is delusional or ignorant, there is no other option.