The Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) concept is very frequently used in energy studies. In fact, many readers seem to think, “Of course, EROEI is what we should be looking at when comparing different types of energy. What else is important?” Unfortunately, the closer to the discussions of researchers a person gets, the more problems a person discovers. People who work with EROEI regularly say, “EROEI is a tool, but it is a blunt tool. An EROEI of 100 is good compared to an EROEI of 10. For small differences, it is not so clear.”
Because of the idiosyncrasies of how EROEI works, different researchers using EROEI analyses come to very different conclusions. This issue has recently come up in two different solar PV analyses. One author used EROEI analysis to justify scaling up of solar PV. Another author published an article in Nature Communications that claims, “A break-even between the cumulative disadvantages and benefits of photovoltaics, for both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, occurs between 1997 and 2018, depending on photovoltaic performance and model uncertainties.”
Other EROEI researchers with whom I correspond don’t agree with these conclusions. They recognize that in complex situations, EROEI analyses cannot cover everything. Somehow, the user needs to be informed enough to realize that these omissions result in biases. Researchers need to work around these biases when coming to conclusions. They themselves do it (or try to); why can’t everyone else?
The underlying problem with EROEI calculations is that EROEI is based on a very simple model. The model works passably well in simple situations, but it was not designed to handle the complexities of intermittent renewables, such as wind and solar PV. Indirect costs, and costs that are hard to measure, tend to get left out. The result is a serious bias that tends to make the EROEIs of solar PV (as well as other intermittent energy sources, such as wind) appear far more favorable than they would be, if a level playing field were used. In fact, published EROEIs for solar PV (and wind) might be called misleading. This issue also exists for other similar calculations, such as Life Cycle Analyses and Energy Payback Periods.
Some Background on EROEI
Proposed types of energy alternatives are often analyzed using Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) calculations. For each type of energy product that is produced, a ratio of the energy output to energy input is calculated. A high ratio gives an indication that the particular approach is very efficient, and thus is likely to produce an inexpensive energy product. Coal is a typical of example of a fuel with high EROEI. Wood cut using a hand saw would also have a very high EROEI. On the other hand, a low ratio of energy output to energy input, such as occurs in the production of biofuels, is expected to be high cost, and thus is not suitable for expanding.
A derivative concept is “net energy.” This is defined as the amount of energy added, when “Energy Input” is subtracted from “Energy Output,” or variations on this amount.1 There are many other related concepts, including “Energy Payback Period” and “Life Cycle Analysis.” The latter can consider materials of all sorts, not just energy materials, and can consider pollution issues as well as energy issues. My discussion here indirectly also relates to these derivative concepts, as well as to the direct calculation of EROEI.
The actual calculation of EROEI amounts varies a moderate amount from researcher to researcher. On the input side, the researcher must make decisions regarding exactly what energy inputs should be included (manufacturing the solar panel, transporting the solar panel to the construction site, building the factory that makes the solar panel, disposing of toxic waste, etc.). These energy inputs are then all converted to a common base, such as British Thermal Units (Btus). On the output side, amounts are fairly clear when the production of fossil fuels is involved, and the calculation is “at the wellhead.” When output from a device such as a solar panel is involved, there are many issues to be considered, including how long the solar panel is expected to last and how many hours of solar output will actually become available given the solar panel’s siting (which may not be known to the researcher). In theory, the energy costs of ongoing maintenance should come into the calculation as well, but will not be available early in the life of the panel when the calculations are made.
Two Kinds of EROEI: Return on Fossil Fuel Energy or Return on Labor
The type of EROEI we generally hear about today is what I would call “energy return on fossil fuel energy invested.” This is a concept developed by Charles Hall in the early 1970s, shortly after the book The Limits to Growth was published in 1972. In fact, it sometimes includes other kinds of energy in the denominator as well, such as hydroelectric. Most people who follow today’s academic literature would probably assume that this is the only kind of EROEI of interest when discussing today’s energy problems.
In fact, there is a different kind of EROEI analysis that preceded fossil fuel EROEI. This is return on the labor of an animal, a theory that now goes under the name Optimal Foraging Theory. Falling return on labor for animals represents the situation in which an animal has to walk (or fly or swim) increasingly far, or is required to swim increasingly upstream, to find the food it needs. Animal populations tend to collapse when their EROEIs fall too low. Prof. Hall taught ecology, so is well versed in the issues of energy return on animal labor.
There is also a parallel analysis of the return on human labor. Return on human labor has been studied for many years, and is documented in books such as The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon. In fact, Homer-Dixon talks about falling EROEI with respect to human labor being the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire.
The return on human labor can drop too low in several ways:
- If resources deplete or erode. For example, if topsoil becomes too thin, or energy supplies become depleted.
- If population rises too much, relative to resources. We are really interested in things like arable land per capita, and barrels of oil per capita.
- If a disproportionate share of the return the economy receives goes to some elite group, so the workers themselves don’t receive enough.
Falling return on human labor is very similar to falling wages. This falling return affects those at the bottom of the employment hierarchy most, such as young people just out of school and workers without too much education. These wages may or may not fall in monetary terms; what is important is that the goods and services that these wages buy fall on a per capita basis. Once falling return on human labor starts happening, the whole system starts unraveling:
- Governments cannot collect enough taxes.
- Businesses lose the economies of scale that they previously had.
- A large share of debt cannot be repaid with interest.
- Individual citizens find that they cannot afford to get married and start new families because their wages are too low, and they have too much debt.
- In earlier times, epidemics became more common because workers could not afford adequate diets.
I would argue that falling return on human labor is the primary type of falling EROEI that we should be concerned about, because it represents the summation of all of the types of returns that the economy is getting. It might be considered the Societal Return on Energy Invested.
I would also argue that Societal EROEI, defined in this way, is already too low. One way this can be seen is through the higher unemployment rate of young people in many countries. Another is a delayed rate of starting new families. Another is wages of many of the less educated workers rising less rapidly than inflation.
The key things that make the calculation of EROEI of human labor and EROEI of animal labor “work” as intended are
- Clear boundaries on what is to be included. The boundary is per animal, or per human being.
- Very close timing between when the energy is consumed (food or other) and when the output is available (animal energy used or goods and services consumed by humans).
- There is an easy way of adding up diverse inputs and outputs, namely using the financial system to count the worth of human labor, or an animal’s energy system to determine whether the food input is sufficient.
The one thing that doesn’t entirely “work” in this model is the fact that the actions of humans can have an adverse impact on other species, but this is not directly reflected in the EROEI of human labor. This is not handled by the wage system, but it can be somewhat handled in the tax system. Of course, if taxes are used to compensate for the adverse impact that humans are having on the ecosystems, the higher taxes will tend to reduce the return on human labor further, and thus bring about collapse more quickly.
Fossil Fuel EROEI as a Cost Estimate
When Prof. Hall developed the concept of EROEI, the concept was intended to be a rough cost estimate. If a particular type of alternative energy required a lot of energy to be created, it would likely be a very expensive type of energy; if very little energy was required, it likely would be inexpensive. When making one energy product using other energy products, energy is usually a major item of input. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that EROEI calculations will work at least as a “blunt tool” for pricing.
The problem in making EROEI more than a blunt tool is the fact that none of the three characteristics that make EROEI on human labor work as expected is present for fossil fuel EROEI. (1) Fossil fuel EROEI boundaries can be made wider by making the list of energy inputs counted longer, but they always remain short of the entire system. (2) Timing is a huge issue, leading to a need for capital and a return on that capital, but there is no adjustment for this in the calculation. (3) The fact that energy quantities rather than prices are being used to add up inputs means that we can never determine something that is comparable to the overall cost of the complete supply chain. Furthermore, similar to the problem with humans adversely affecting other species, intermittent electricity adversely affects both the electric grid and the pricing of other types of electricity. EROEI calculations leave out these impacts.
The fossil fuel EROEI system ends up being similar to a system that compares tops of icebergs, when these icebergs are floating at somewhat different levels, and we can’t measure the relative levels well. Furthermore, our measuring tool is restricted to only one type of input: energy that can be counted somewhere in the cycle. Adverse impacts, such as damage to the grid or to the electricity pricing system, are not counted at all.
The danger with EROEI comparisons is that a person ends up with “apples to oranges” comparisons. Generally, the more similar energy types are, the more likely EROEI comparisons are likely to be truly comparable. For example, EROEIs for the same oil field, made with data a year or two apart, are more likely to be more meaningful than a comparison of EROEIs for fossil fuels with those for intermittent electricity.
Specific Problems with the EROEI of Solar PV
(1) Prospective EROEI calculations tend to have a bias toward what is “hoped for,” rather than serving as a direct calculation of what has been achieved. If the EROEI of an oil field, or of a hydroelectric plant that has been in operation for many years, is desired, it is not terribly hard to find reasonable numbers for inputs and outputs. All a researcher needs to do is figure out pounds of concrete, steel, and other materials that went into the initial structure, as well as inputs needed on a regular basis, and actual outputs; with these, a calculation can be made. When estimates are made for new devices, the bias is always toward what is hoped to be achieved. How much electricity will a solar panel produce, if it is properly sited, properly maintained, maintenance costs are very low, the electric grid can actually use all of the electricity that the panel produces, and all parts of the system last for the expected life of the solar panel?
(2) All energy is given the same “weight,” whether it is high quality or low quality energy. Intermittent energy, such as is produced by solar PV, is in fact extremely low quality output, but there is no adjustment for this fact in the calculation. It counts the same as much better quality electrical output, such as that provided by hydroelectric.
(3) There is no charge for the use of capital. When capital goods such as solar panels are used to produce energy products, this has several negative impacts on the economy: (a) Part of the energy produced must go to pay for the interest and/or dividends related to long-term capital use, but there is energy cost assigned to this; (b) A country’s debt to GDP ratio tends to rise, as the economy is required to use ever-more debt to finance all of the new capital goods; and (c) The wealth of the economy tends to become ever-more concentrated in the owners of capital goods, leaving workers less well off. EROEI calculations don’t charge for any of these deficiencies. These deficiencies are part of what makes it virtually impossible to scale up the use of wind and solar PV as a substitute for fossil fuels.
(4) EROEI indications tend to be misleadingly favorable, because they leave out hard-to-estimate costs. EROEI analyses tend to focus on amounts that are “easy to count.” For solar PV, the amount that is easiest to count is the cost of making and transporting the solar PV. Installation costs vary greatly from site to site, especially for home installations, so these costs are likely to be left out. Indirect benefits provided by governments, such as newly built roads to accommodate a new solar PV installation, are also likely to be omitted. The electric utility that has to deal with all of the intermittent electricity has to deal with a whole host of problems being dumped on it, including offsetting the impact of intermittency and upgrading the newly added electricity so that it truly meets grid standards. There are individual studies (such as here and here) that look directly at some of these issues, but they tend to be omitted from the narrow-boundary analyses included in the meta-studies, which researchers tend to rely on.
(5) Precisely how solar PV at scale can be integrated into the grid is unclear, so costs required for grid integration are not considered in EROEI calculations. There are a number of approaches that might be used to integrate solar PV into the electric grid. One approach would be to use complete battery backup of all solar PV and wind. The catch is that there is seasonal variation as well as daily variation in output; huge overbuilding and a very large amount of batteries would be required if the grid system were to provide electricity from intermittent renewables throughout the winter months, without supplementation from other sources. Even if storage is only used to smooth out daily fluctuations, the energy cost would be very high.
Another approach would be to continue to maintain the entire fossil fuel and nuclear generation systems, even though they would run only for a small part of the time. This would require paying staff for year-around work, even though they are needed for only part of the year. Other costs, such as maintaining pipelines, would continue year around as well.
A partial approach, which might somewhat reduce the energy needs for other approaches, would be to greatly increase the amount of electricity transmission, to try to smooth out fluctuations in electricity availability. None of these costs are included in EROEI calculations, even though they are very material.
(6) Solar PV (as well as other intermittent electricity, such as wind) causes direct harm to other types of energy producers by artificially lowering wholesale electricity prices. Wholesale prices tend to fall to artificially low levels, because intermittent electricity, including solar PV, is added to the electric grid, whether or not it is really needed. In fact, solar PV adds very little, if any, true “capacity” to a system, so there is no logical reason why prices for other producers should be reduced when solar PV is added. These other producers need the full wholesale cost of electricity, without the downward adjustment caused by the addition of intermittent energy sources, if they are to obtain a sufficient return on their investment to make it possible to continue to provide their services.
These issues tend to drive needed back-up electricity generation out of business. This is a problem, especially for nuclear electricity providers. Nuclear providers find themselves being pressured to close before the ends of their lifetimes, because of the low prices. This is true both in France and the United States.
In some cases, extra “capacity payments” are being made to try to work around these issues. These capacity payments usually result in the building of more natural gas fired electricity generating units. Unfortunately, these payments do nothing to guarantee that the natural gas required to operate these plants will actually be available when it is needed. But gas-fired generating units are cheap to build. Problem (sort of) solved!
(7) Electricity generation using solar PV cannot be scaled up very well. There are multiple issues involved, including cost, debt, difficulty in handling the variable output, and the adverse impact of the intermittent electricity on the profitability of other carriers.
What Should Be Done Next?
It seems to me that a statement needs to be made that EROEI was a preliminary pricing method for various fuel types developed back in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, it is a blunt tool, and is not really suitable for pricing intermittent electricity, including solar PV, wind energy, and wave energy. It presents a far more favorable view of adding these energy types to the electric grid than is really the case. Hydroelectric energy is sometimes considered intermittent, but is really “dispatchable” most of the time, so it does not present the same problems.
EROEI calculations are in a sense the output of a very simple model. What we are finding now is that this model is not sufficiently complex to deal with the way intermittent electricity affects the system as a whole. What needs to be substituted for all of these EROEI model results (including “net energy,” Life Cycle Analysis, and other derivative results) is real world cost levels using very much wider boundaries than are included in EROEI calculations.
Euan Mearns has shown that in Europe, countries that use large amounts of wind and solar tend to have very high residential electricity prices. This comparison strongly suggests that when costs are charged back to consumers, they are very high. (In the US, subsidies tend to be hidden in the tax system instead of raising prices, so the same pattern is not observed.)
Figure 1. Figure by Euan Mearns showing relationship between installed wind + solar capacity and European electricity rates. Source Energy Matters.
Even this comparison omits some potential costs involved, because intermittent electricity concentration levels are not yet at the point where it has been necessary to add huge banks of backup batteries. Also, the adverse impact on the profitability of other types of electricity generation is a major issue, but it is not something that can easily be reflected in a chart such as that shown in Figure 1.
It seems to me that going forward, a completely different approach is needed, if we want to evaluate which energy products should be included in our electricity mix. The low energy prices (for oil, natural gas, coal, and electricity) that we have been experiencing during the last 30 months are a sign that consumers cannot really afford very high electricity prices. Analysts need to be looking at various scenarios to see what changes can be made to try to keep costs within the amounts consumers can actually afford to pay. In fact, it probably would be helpful if building of new generation could be reduced to a minimum and existing generation could be kept operating as long as possible, to keep costs down.
The issue of low wholesale prices for electricity generated by nuclear, gas, and coal needs to be analyzed carefully, since, for example, France cannot easily get along without nuclear electricity. Nuclear energy is generally a much larger provider of electricity than wind and solar. Somehow, the financial returns of non-intermittent providers need to be made high enough that they can continue in operation, if they are not at the ends of their normal lifetimes. I am not sure how this can be done, short of banning intermittent electricity providers, including those currently in operation, from the grid.
A Long-Term Role for Solar PV
It appears that our civilization is reaching limits. In fact, it seems likely that our current electric grid will not last many years–probably not as long as people expect solar panels will last. We also know that in past collapses, the only thing that seemed to partially mitigate the situation was radical simplification. For example, China transported goods in animal-powered carts prior to collapse, but changed to transporting goods in wheelbarrows, after it collapsed about the third century A. D.
Building on this idea, the place for intermittent renewables would seem to be off the electric grid. They would likely need to operate in very small networks, probably serving individual homes or businesses. For example, some homeowners might want to set up 12 volt direct current systems, operating a few LED lights and a few specially designed 12 volt direct current appliances. Businesses might want to do more. The problem, of course, comes in maintaining these systems, as batteries degrade and other parts need to be replaced. It would seem that this type of transition could be handled without huge subsidies from governments.
The belief that we can maintain our current electric grid system practically indefinitely, using only wind + solar + hydroelectric + biomass, is almost certainly a pipe dream. We need to be looking at the situation more realistically, and making plans based on what might actually be feasible.
Note:
[1] In defining net energy, some would say that Energy Input should be multiplied by a factor of three before the subtraction is done, because input energy is only partially counted in most calculations. Another variation is that the calculation varies by energy product, and whether EROEI has been calculated using a “wellhead” or “point of use” approach. These variations further add to confusion regarding exactly which amounts are comparable to which other amounts.
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Just inaugurated the first kilometer of solar roadway in France (Normandy!)
Very promising, with a cost at least 20 times higher than that of rooftop PV (and I’m pretty sure they had to “omit” some components to reach it!). On the road again!
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/12/23/business/small-french-towns-wattway-solar-road-converts-sunshine-power-street-lights/#.WF0gqoBPehA
I wonder how long it will last and how many problems it will cause for the grid.
No risk for the grid (from there), this subventions-pump cannot scale up anyway.
I think it is grid neutral 🙂
I like it. Will disconnect itself over time. Automatically.
In Europe we are always the first to do the biggest nonsense … dammit !
This should not be a time for any new projects (although it should be noted that this French town is, ironically, trying to save on real estate costs). No new buildings, roads, fancy technical fixes. This link shows what the development crowds are up to. One boondoggle after the next.
http://www.planetizen.com/
Her’s a good one:
http://www.planetizen.com/node/90376/transforming-vacant-properties-creative-hubs-communities
I commented on this one:
http://www.planetizen.com/node/90383/35-million-awarded-further-demise-robert-moses-parkway
“I couldn’t win this argument, but I think projects like this are arrogant and a waste. A loss of embedded energy, for one thing. I’d rather see the parkway put to good use through creative means instead of politically (in)correct dogma. Money is scarce. Let’s not use it on boondoggles, even green ones.”
This could be the snowflake that triggers the financial collapse:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-22/china-shocked-navarro-appointment-trump-team-proposed-10-import-tariff
I certainly was not a fan of Clinton, but at least she could have given us a better chance at BAU (albeit for a very short time, but hey every extra day, week, month counts) than this guy…
canuck1867-
Trump is not popular here and in our country for sure but it was Clinton’s taking us to war that concerned me more than Trump. She had all the backing of the Neocon warmongers. If tensions with Russia can be defused, that will be a good thing. We will know soon enough I suppose.
Putin and Trump are geniuses. The MIC gets its funding for making useless weapons, without any actual war. This new nuclear arms race could be the best thing to happen. The best way to justify spending trillions of dollars processing nuclear waste, to get the plutonium for weapons. If both sides say they will do it, then the factions in both nations will have to support it or their nation will fall behind.
Maybe even create some jobs, increase energy consumption and commodity prices building a bunch of new missile complexes. Separate and store the various waste products. Maybe even justify building new breeder reactors.
Interesting perspective, Matthew. I also see that Henry Kissinger is talking to and making purring noises about Donald Trump, and he is probably contributing ideas and suggestions. Geopolitics is getting interesting again.
https://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/saudi-arabia-crude-exports-fall-151629070.html
Saudi Arabia produces 10.6 mbpd.
Exports 7.6 mbpd plus 1.4 mbpd refined products.
Consumes 1.6 mbpd.
Saudis export more than they import… but still they have a current deficit and burn through their foreign currency reserves at the tune of almost $100 billion a year.
I don’t understand this… I must be missing something.
I don’t have the numbers in front of me. Work with a source like BP ‘s compilation. You might look at natural gas plus oil. In fact, BP gives total energy consumption. You have to add up types of energy produced yourself.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-saudis-keep-pumping-thirst-for-domestic-oil-swells-1435786552
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?country=sa&product=oil&graph=consumption
Those links seem to suggest that Saudi consumes about a third of its oil to stay alive, and will “need to import oil by 2030”
with a rising population and diminishing oil supplies, it would seem that Saudi is well and truly self- screwed
I know that they are trying to work on substituting natural gas for oil, where they can. Natural gas is expensive to transport, and doesn’t get a good market price, so it is best for home consumption, such as making electricity.
I know that Saudi Arabia is now importing aluminum and processing it into aluminum parts. This is an energy intensive process. I hope they are using natural gas rather than oil to do this. This contributes to their high energy use.
Saudi exports where $200 billion in 2015.
Saudi Imports where $160 billion in 2015.
Still the current deficit was $30 billion in 2015 ?
A large part of the work force is foreign and they send money home.
Saudis have external debt that they might be paying off… Corruption is another source ?
http://wits.worldbank.org/countrysnapshot/en/SAU
I am afraid that I don’t have any inside information on this.
“Saudis export more petrol than they import”,
I expect they have to import everything else, which is very expensive, as well as desalinate seawater, etc…
At least it seems that they are importing the work done in the kingdom.
7.63 million (2009 est.) note: about 80% of the labor force is non-national
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Saudi_Arabia
Right. Saudi wants more value added exports.
The Galileo Seven (1967) ST TOS
This should be broadcast every other week along with The Emperor’s New Clothes.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-23/italy-to-plow-up-to-21-billion-into-banks-as-paschi-plan-fails
‘Italy to Plow Up to $21 Billion Into Banks as Paschi Plan Fails’
“Italy will plow as much as 20 billion euros ($21 billion) into the country’s banks after Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA failed to secure its future by raising funds from investors, and other lenders could follow.”
So in other words, investors were savvy enough to stay clear, so the Government has to step in and hold the banks’ hand. Hmm, not a good sign my people.
Wonder how many other banks will run into the same problem. In Italy and elsewhere.
Soon. Government owns all banks. Central banks own all government bonds and most other securities. Interest rates negative forever. For how long forever is.
Governments take over the bankrupt banks. The banks take over the bankrupt industries. The industries take over the bankrupt people. People take over the bankrupt governments. The ECB just keeps on printing to finance the show.
If they would allow everything to go bankrupt then commodity and energy prices would collapse to bottom floor ?
money only has meaning when there is energy in the national system to support it
The energy consumption in Italy has fallen by 20 percent in the last years.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Gross_inland_consumption_of_energy,_1990%E2%80%932014_(million_tonnes_of_oil_equivalent)_YB16.png
EU has actually pledged to cut energy consumption by 20 percent by 2020. Italy seems to be ahead of the schedule.
surely that means that the Italian economic system is resetting itself to take account of energy-reality
I believe Greece is ahead of schedule as well. Countries that look like they are collapsing (Greece, Syria, Venezuela) are places to look for falling consumption.
Past peak capita commodities it seems logical they would get less affordable, how could we collapse otherwise?
If the numbers are high or low? I trust they will be low like you say.
We had high commodity prices from 2000 to 2008 when the prices spiked and the economy collapsed.
Then we had another round of high prices with the help of QE until they collapsed again in 2014.
Now we on the other side of the peak and falling down ?
I think prices get obfuscated because of debt and other financial tricks, but affordability is on the way down.
Now we have a lot of surplus and spends most of our energy tokens on home styling consultants, new IT systems and tunnels and bridges.
With less surplus most energy tokens should go towards necessities.
I don’t have good explanation to the glut and to low prices… except for inertia in production after massive capex on the production side… and demand destruction on the economy side due to failing economies.
Demand is most likely still intact and rising among economic classed who consume luxury ? And governments with access to printing presses that print world reserve currencies ?
Yes. We are experiencing collapse. This is a different phenomenon than Peak Oil writers wrote about. It has to do with inadequate wages as we reach limits. Prices tend to fall too low. The problem is inadequate “demand.”
Yes It is of course the bottom that falls out first in a economy… the sub prime economy… or sub prime economies around the world.
I agree. Sunk costs and fixed costs.
A company can be downsized.
If your business is 100 million living in a desert downsizing is harder.
Few jobs, collapsing governments.
India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHc1Gitiq-s
While it’s a little amateurish, there are (more than) snippets of reality in there.
Bartering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZJtgccaCXI
Real deep poverty. But still, they have food.
There is also the demographic dimension of the problem.
Here is very interesting blog describing the demand destruction from the ageing population in first world / OECD countries:
https://econimica.blogspot.com/2016_11_01_archive.html
Japan example leads the way:
https://econimica.blogspot.com/2016/08/japansanityor-why-japans-yen-will.html
I believe it’s forbidden according EU rules for governments to bail out failing banks… but who cares anymore… perhaps it isn’t forbidden to nationalize banks.
Yep, that’s what they are doing, by the way just announced another debt can kicking vehicle, new class of bonds. As I told you so numerous times, no instadoom, instead can kicking for years and decades to continue..
http://wolfstreet.com/2016/12/22/new-class-of-high-risk-bank-bonds-to-prop-up-french-tbtf-banks/
Thank you for your latest effort and good topic to explore.
Found this article of “The Economist” that explores another aspect
Solar cells
How clean is solar power?
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21711301-new-paper-may-have-answer-how-clean-solar-power
To estimate the number of solar panels installed around the world, Dr Van Sark and his team used data from the International Energy Agency, an autonomous intergovernmental body. They gleaned information on the amount of energy required to make panels from dozens of published studies. Exactly how much carbon dioxide was emitted during the manufacture of a panel will depend on where it was made, as well as when. How much emitted gas it has saved will depend on where it is installed. A panel made in China, for example, costs nearly double the greenhouse-gas emissions of one made in Europe. That is because China relies more on fossil fuels for generating power. Conversely, the environmental benefits of installing solar panels will be greater in China than in Europe, as the clean power they produce replaces electricity that would otherwise be generated largely by burning coal or gas.
Once the team accounted for all this, they found that solar panels made today are responsible, on average, for around 20 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of energy they produce over their lifetime (estimated as 30 years, regardless of when a panel was manufactured). That is down from 400-500 grams in 1975. Likewise, the amount of time needed for a solar panel to produce as much energy as was involved in its creation has fallen from about 20 years to two years or less. As more panels are made, the manufacturing process becomes more efficient. The team found that for every doubling of the world’s solar capacity, the energy required to make a panel fell by around 12% and associated carbon-dioxide emissions by 17-24%.
Sceptics, though, observe that a lot of energy is needed to make a solar panel in the first place. In particular, melting and purifying the silicon that these panels employ to capture and transduce sunlight needs a lot of heat. Silicon’s melting point, 1,414°C, is only 124°C less than that of iron.
Silicon is melted in electric furnaces and, at the moment, most electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels. That does emit carbon dioxide. So, when a new solar panel is put to work it starts with a “carbon debt” that, from a greenhouse-gas-saving point of view, has to be paid back before that panel becomes part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. Observing this, some sceptics have gone so far as to suggest that if the motive for installing solar panels is environmental (which is often, though not always, the case), they are pretty-much useless
It seems that many ‘green’ efforts from hybrid cars to battery powered lawnmowers have a manufacturing cost related to fossil fuels. That coupled with the transport costs add up to a carbon debt that requires a long term use for payback. Designing more repairability into vehicles would help. I was glad to see that many Prius cars run over 250K miles in their useful life.
Prius cars do well, if we can keep the system operating long enough to use the for 250,000 miles. My impression is that all electric cars tend to get used a whole lot less. They also depend on the availability of charging stations, and for that matter, the electric grid continuing. If the point is saving oil, Priuses give much better payback from the batteries used than all electric cars.
I have a 2008 Prius that just went over 100,000 miles a few weeks ago. I read an article a couple of years ago that says the overall carbon footprint of a Prius is higher than the average SUV until the Prius goes over 100,000 miles. So it looks like I’m just beginning the energy savings portion, depending on how much useful life I can get out of the batteries. I never deluded myself into thinking it was great for the environment, I just wanted to get 45-50 mpg.
There is an argument about these costs. The grid also has costs. Including them makes the problem worse.
There is an argument about these costs. If it is necessary to add to the all of the spending that the electric grid needs to do to fix the problems the solar panels make, that makes the problem worde
Depends on the fossil-fuel intensity of the economy in general and the manufacturer in particular. Panels from solar powered manufacturing facility such as Tesla’s Gigafactory … or a factory with electrical furnaces / kilns in Montreal (100% hydropower electricity) has a lower carbon debt–potentially significantly so. At least with solar / wind, the trend lines of carbon intensity per unit of power output is heading in the right direction, whereas with fossil-fuels all the trend lines–CAPEX, EROI, affordability and climate externalities–are headed quite steeply south.
Be sure to include all the costs, if you put solar power or wind on the grid. The costs of the electric company increase, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Inverter costs are always high, leading to lots of replacements. The total system costs rise rapidly for both wind and solar, if added to the grid. The only way intermittent renewables sort of work is off the grid, without inverters. Businesses or individuals need to purchase their own complete systems and deal with repairs as they are needed.
Steel reinforced concrete used at present for most industrial infrastructure last less than 100 years. Think about all of the infrastructure that exists now. Would we be able to mine the required
minerals,transport them,manufacture the materials required,and rebuild that infrastructure using energy supplied by solar and wind infrastructure? It is blindingly obvious that the answer to that is
‘No’. That is just one of many reasons that industrial civilisation will collapse this century, even
if the effects of atmospheric CO2 was not leading to collapse in the near future.
https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-reinforced-concrete-56078
which sort of puts the frame out towards the “200 year” timeframe I suggested in an earlier post—-100 years for everything to come apart, then another 100 years as it sinks in that humankind no longer has the means to rebuild anything of any consequence—
after that we’re back to primitive medievalism.
Timeframe might well be wrong of course
Probably an accurate assessment of the situation.
Norman,
to me the schedule looks like 2017-2018 every financial trick used to prop up the global BAU. 2019 global financial system breakdown. 2019-2020 no more spare parts from around the globe. Grid down, groceries empty, trucks stop. Everywhere.
In places like Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Scandinavia things could be mitigated because population density is not super-overwhelming. Yet. But cognitive dissonance of all sorts probably will not allow mitigation manuevers.
By 2025, global population down by 90-95%
By 2050, biosphere breakdown, global population down by 99% – 99.99%
By 2100, oceans dead, biosphere gone, global population down 99.999% – 100.00%
To me a 200y timeframe doesn’t make any sense
I totally agree with you Van, I have the same timeframe in mind as you. For 4 years now I have been saying I will probably not see my 50th birthday…I was born in 71…Carpe Diem has been my favourite motto these last few years 🙂
my 200 year thing isn’t the timeframe for societal/social collapse—that will obviously be much sooner.
my 200 year thinking is for the expunging of everything we had during our 200 rise since, say. the 1820s or thereabouts—though i’d be the first to admit I might be talking nonsense.
in other words, the future time when realisation has finally fixed itself, that power by means of internal combustion/explosive forces is finally over, and there are no aliens, messiahs, political systems available to extract the basic energy we need—ie food and shelter—from the earth we live on, other than that which we gain by our own muscle-efforts.
It might also mean the imposition of science heresy doctrine—-don’t laugh. Already you have deniers of every stripe in government office. Give those people real control and they will impose any doctrine, no matter how foolish or bizarre.
Science got us into this mess, so “ban” all further scientific progress.–Repeal the enlightenment, the world was created in 4004 BC after all—burn all the heretics!!
Right now I’d say Pence is far more dangerous than Trump.
If/when Trump gets impeached, that leaves Pence as POTUS.
When the economy crashes, and civil unrest ensues, the military will have to be used to keep order.
That could possibly happen in the next 4 years.
That makes Pence a dictator, with insane theocratic certainties (google his record) There are plenty of people around him to enforce theo-fascism
(That is a severe short term risk I think)
Pence would appear to be a dominionist.—or certainly to have such inclinations.
My future timeframe will see far fewer of us obviously—and with maybe 10% of our current numbers, wars will be too expensive in terms of effort to carry out—we will be generally too far apart for other than skirmishes—or maybe we will have learned that mass homicide was a bad idea after all—who knows? I’m doubtful about that though.
In the 1340s, the black death wiped out a third of Europe’s population—we look back on that as “unfortunate”–in other words, time itself has erased all sympathy for what happened back then. We realise things must have been horrendous, if we think of it at all, but then get on with our present lives.
200 years hence, that would be my thinking for what is about to happen to us now.
Norman,
we know the real collapse will start from the banks. We know the derivatives will be the final nail in the coffin. We know that once the derivatives go ‘pop’ interest rates in the bond markets will sky rocket, which will make all governments go ‘pop’. No more dollar. No more pound sterling. No more yuan. All currencies will fail simultanously. All banks will fall simultanously. All governments will collapse simultaneously. Everything that was BAU will be SHTF overnight.
When money and currencies can not be measured, currencyvalues have wild fluctuations, then international trade will stop. With shipping containers not coming in, then spare parts will not come in. Within days and weeks the just-in-time economy will collapse, globally. The groceries will go empty. And the grid will come down. Trucks will stop rolling. Fertilizers and diesel will not be available to farmers. Feed will not come to animal farms.
It will be fast. It will be global. And it will come as a shock.
When the grid comes down, so will the internet, television and the radio stations. People will be left alone, with only vague rumors and stories. The shock will be so bad that it will rock the very foundations of reality for the majority of the populace. Many will simply refuse to live in this new reality and take their own lives. At that point a thousand new cultures will be born all over the globe. Without contact to each other. All with their own explanations of the new reality they now live in. Governments and/or the military will be unable to react because of energy and resource constraints.
Then the big cities will become pure h-ell. And millions will start to pour out of the big cities, eating, looting and pillaging.. everything..
Within weeks the looting will be so bad, that most people will only move outside at night. With groups of four to five armed men. Everybody else will stay indoors.
There will be no “realization” or “doctrines”, only whether or not food is available, toilet paper, toothpaste, canned foods, vodka, handguns, ammo.. there will be no considerations of power satellites, science, religions, energy or the meaning of life. The only thing that will matter to people, is where to loot the next stash of canned beans from..
Good observation, but the fine mechanism of collapse is something that is still not well explained, or I do not finish visualizing it.
What will cause the derivatives to ‘pop’ and the total collapse to begin? Could it be a collapse of commodity prices? Why could not it stop the collapse with more debt at that moment?
I am clear that one day not too far away, the debt will not be able to do anything, but I still do not see clearly the mechanism.
“I am clear that one day not too far away, the debt will not be able to do anything, but I still do not see clearly the mechanism.”
I think panic/loss of faith is the determining factor. Our whole system of credit and trade is all about faith and trust and falls apart the moment that is lost.
Also, the good investments are pretty much gone. We have lots of hard to extract resources. By the time we spend what is needed for extraction, the necessary price is so high that few can afford goods made from them. Few buy the high-priced homes and cars made from them. Commodity prices drop below the cost of production. Return on debt turned negative.
Crates,
with limits on a finite world, and limits on cheap oil + coal -> economic growth can not continue -> with limited economic growth governments go in to debt, central banks lower interest rates -> economic growth at any and all costs -> because, without growth, banks interests can not be met, or debts serviced -> without growth -> all prices, including oil and commodities must fall -> growth and profits at any and all costs..
Now we are at NIRP and ZIRP, low commodity prices and super-duper government debtlevels. The clock is one minute to midnight.
Banks can not recapitalize with NIRP/ZIRP.. and with more and more bankruptcies, more and more debts.. failing.. putting more and more pressure on the banks..
For a while central banks can buy stocks. For a while central banks can recapitalize all banks globally.
Next comes IMF SDRs to rescue the banks. And then maybe cashless society. And banks taking your money as their own. Maybe helicopter money. Maybe some other magic tricks.
But finally.. when enough debts have failed (because lack of profits and lack of economic growth) when NIRP/ZIRP has lasted long enough.. banks implode.. everywhere.. simultaneously..
Van Kent, thanks for the nice summary. I keep it in the memory of my computer because it is worth it. I understand that, but you said this:
“But finally .. when enough debts have failed (because lack of profits and lack of economic growth) when NIRP / ZIRP has lasted long enough .. banks implode .. everywhere .. simultaneously ..”
The mechanism of that “D-day” is the part of the equation that I do not finish visualizing in order to have the whole picture. Perhaps as I said, if the beginning is due to the collapse of the derivatives, it may be the collapse of commodity prices that causes it. Perhaps it is for the reason of total loss of confidence as Matthew said.
I do not know.
Thanks again for your answer.
Crates,
The biggest derivative market should be with the interest rate swaps in government bonds. Nobody actually knows the size of the derivatives market. Is it 5, 10, 15 or 20 times global gdp? But when governments need more money, from the banks, but banks are insolvent because of above mentioned reasons, then interest rates rise. When interest rates go wild because banks default. Then derivateves go ‘pop’. It’s all connected..
The “trigger”.. what is it? Well it’s all of them. Global gdp growth slowing, is one crack in the dam. Profits down in publicly traded companies is another crack in the dam. Big banks in trouble, yet another crack in the dam. The U.S. not getting enough debt without interest raising, yet another crack. Too low oil prices. A crack. Commodities hitting rock bottom. A crack.
It’s not a matter of IF the dam will break, but when. How can we say what the “trigger” was? Was it the first crack. The last one. Or all of them?
i think its hard to say where the trigger for collapse will come from
maybe it’s already happened—we tend to form opinions using the rear view mirror of history.
Trump might be that trigger point, where the economy is destabilised through crackpot economic theories, refusal to be advised, and a destabilised economy leading to civil disorder and necessary military intervention. That has to come as living itself becomes unaffordable
THE EU will go the same way, and Russia might take advantage of perceived weakness to divert attention from her own domestic problems.
We will only know for sure when we look back
collapse is when YOUR supermarket or filling station is closed for lack of supplies and you realise you have less fuel in your tank than it would take to get to where filling up might be possible, and you ignored all those idiots on OFW warning you to keep food supplies in the house for a few months at least.
Collapse has already arrived if you’re homeless with little hope of any long term alternative
Collapse affecting people in sub saharan Africa is not your collapse. But it will catch up with you of course, in due time
so there are many collapses—eventually of course they must coalesce into one.
Gail wrote: “the good investments are pretty much gone.” I see this as a major reason for explosive growth in major cities. The shift of capital into the cities has even been discussed in the business sections of various newspapers. But they never draw the inferences and links that are clear to Gail and most of her readers.
I’m in Seattle, and the boom, driven by Amazon et al., is breathtaking. The irony is this last (hopefully) gasp of growth makes people here even more oblivious to the biophysical and economic situation evaluated and discussed on OFW. The boom will also make the fall that much more shocking and unpleasant. I get queasy just reading these comments. [And no, FE’s over-the-top theatrics are not needed to make the points clear.]
All that said, I sure hope the projection of near instantaneous (days/weeks) collapse is not accurate. Ugly.
India has basically just banned cash. It also looks like Italy’s banking problems have move to front and center in the ongoing EU crisis.
Van Kent-
I’m like this guy when I read what you say here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqdNe8u-Jsg
Joe, you will absolutely not come through this alive!
The video he posted pretty much says he realizes that!! Your video is very à propos Joebanana lollll
99.999 DJ, 99.999! Yeah baby!!!
A million to a million, you will die. Some day. Sorry.
(Soon Keith will correct me.)
I agree most realistic assessment.
I should have mentioned ‘Smelt’ the ores as well as mine and transport.
If you want reenforced concrete to last a long time, use basalt re-bar. It’s more expensive than even green-coated (corrosion-resistant) rebar, but it can’t rust and rupture the artificial stone.
I’m generally interested in the topic of decline rates. Greer just posted an article on ‘how the peak oil movement failed’. Only a few comments on that it wasn’t really a failure, but that ‘depletion never sleeps’ and ‘the movement did indeed raise awareness’.
It seem like on this site at least, we agree the peak oil people were too optimistic. I find this interesting as they were/are considered alarmists in other groups, but on this site they are optimists (presumably because they were primarily focusing on geology and theoretical flow rates and assuming that prices would go up to enable extraction of most of the last resources).
Campbell et al has a peak of oil about now, and roughly 1/2 of today’s flow by 2050.
What are some other estimates of flow at 2050? Or is it just impossible to estimate given that it sort of becomes a question of economic collapse, and it’s too uncertain?
JM Greer is overrated. In his article does not mention OFW and that is a “strange” oblivion. The Archdruid Report is an personal opinion blog, but nothing more.
Estimates of future production can not be made without taking into account the state of the future economy and this is something that is not understood still.
And the estimates of geologists as Campbell have that lack, so they are not reliable.
I don’t write about Peak Oil. That is a wrong understanding of the story. So I am not offended by being left out.
Zero is a good estimate for 2050.
Yes on 2050
Merry Christmas and thnks for all the hard work and hours you put in
Thanx for the article Gail.
If EROEI was invented as a pricing method it would also work the other way around: use pricing as an EROEI method. in simple maths: If P=f.E then E = (1/f).P.
In which P is the price of a product, E, is energy input and f is a price factor, constant over a short period (eg. a year or so) indicating the costs of producing energy today.
In fact, it is my understanding that this upside down approach is the way some EROEI is calculated. The question is what is the price, and what is the usual energy consumption per $ of GDP. (Also, does this ratio need to be adjusted, because the product seems to be more or less energy intensive than usual.
Corollary: organic food is energy intensive food. Either that, or it uses a lot of expensive human energy.
“Corollary: organic food is energy intensive food. Either that, or it uses a lot of expensive human energy.”
Don’t get this. Isn’t the organic food what supplies the human labor?
Yes indeed, organic food is energy intensive food a soon it is sold for a high price. That high price is used as income for the human labor so that human can consume other goods, warm his house, buy an applepie, ride a car etc.
You pro-solar folks are not getting it through your heads. Solar PV power is crappy low energy garbage that needs inverters to “condition” the solar PV output for the grid. Who pays this cost? Solar PV is intermittent which means it can go for days without producing anything at all. So, it is worse than garbage! Fossil fuels have to come to the rescue to pick up the slack. Oh, wait, we wanted to eliminate FF what happened? Who pays this cost to maintain the FF backup? Ask Germany if they have a solution (hint – they don’t).
If it is not obvious to you that solar PV is hanging on the coat-tails of fossil fuels, you are blind. Fossil fuels have paid there own way with massive amounts of net energy to build literally everything we have today. Not only did FF do that, they had energy left over to grow the economy, produce jobs, power the green revolution, allowed taxes to fund governments, funded loans, allowed for positive interest rates, pension plans, retirements, investments and on and on and on. Solar PV is a parasite on FF. Solar power cannot and never will be able to carry its own weight and build its own supporting infrastructure the way FF have. Adding all these band-aid ancillary components (inverters, batteries, pumped storage, exotic materials, tax incentives, rebates) is just a nail in the coffin to the pitifully low energy density of a solar panel. It is just like putting lipstick on a pig.
If your rich or way off the beaten path, go for solar PV + battery backup if you can afford it. But, solar PV will never ever replace what FF do for us.
My best stab at a Fast Eddy reply 🙂
Just post this image and text. Every. single. time. All delusional motherf#ckers who think we can simply swap out at this late stage, can simply choke on it…
And this isn’t even accounting for all the externalities involved in trying to maintain our unsustainable way of life. Chiefly climate change and habitat destruction.
http://www.theoildrum.com/files/ncmo01_0.gif
How much energy is in a cubic mile of oil (= roughly 1 years consumption)
A cubic mile of oil has energy equivalent to:
4 Three Gorges dams, cranking for 50 years.
32850 1.65 megawatt wind turbines, cranking for 50 years (100% capacity factor).
91,250,000 2.1 kW solar PV installations, for 50 years.
104 500 megawatt coal-fired electric plants, for 50 years.
52 1.1 gigawatt nuclear electric plants, for 50 years.
Is that equivalency for each or all five?
FE would be proud 🙂
Fast Eddy has taught you well.
And your RealitiSTANi training is complete.
Indeed!
Yes. And it all has to be rebuilt every 40 or 50 years. The ores supplying the minerals
for all industrial infrastructure are becoming less mineral’rich,which means that the energy required for manufacturing is continually increasing. Can that energy requirement
be supplied by the solar and wind infrastructure? Only in dreamland. You might have
to change your name to ‘Fast Greg’.
That’s kind of the killer. That everything has to eventually be rebuilt. Initially it’s easy to build out since very little is falling apart at the same time. But eventually decay will creep up and replacement becomes a real thing. Here in WA-USA, we’re replacing one bridge with another at great expense, and very little improvement. Of course the new bridge is more expensive so it’s not a cost benefit either.
Water mains in LA: http://graphics.latimes.com/la-aging-water-infrastructure/
Pretty much everything is at that stage. Nuclear plants, bridges…
Wind turbines are very difficult in this respect as they suffer from complicated loads and fatigue. Newer are better, but many 1st gen turbines are already in the land fill.
Yes. I placed a comment on the next page ,along similar lines.
But if you’re not frustrated quite enough just yet, try listening to the Greenpeace lady at 15:26. I prefer Trump.
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/23/absolutely_frightening_greenpeace_responds_to_trumps
lol, you prefer Trump because Annie Leonard says we should invest billions of $ in alternative energy instead of nuclear weapons. Such a binary world view, but if forced to choose between stupid and destructive and insanely stupid, I’ll pick stupid.
“but if forced to choose between stupid and destructive and insanely stupid, I’ll pick stupid.”
You ( & Greenpeace) don’t understand. A nuclear arms race is the only way to justify spending trillions on dealing with the spent nuclear fuel stockpiles. This could be our best chance at not wiping out all complex life when BAU ends. If Greenpeace understood this, they would be all for it.
Plus Greenpeace seems to fail to understand intermittent vs baseload power or the true costs of trying to make renewables dispatchable.
I did not get to that point; I was reacting to the transcript up front. (Did not listen to video.)
How does a nuclear arms race lead to spending trillions to deal with nuclear fuel stockpiles? “Nuclear fuel stockpiles” to make bombs are not the same as all the waste lying around outside power stations and at Hanford etc. is it? Really, I don’t understand.
““Nuclear fuel stockpiles” to make bombs are not the same as all the waste lying around outside power stations and at Hanford etc. is it? Really, I don’t understand.”
Yrs. Nuclear weapons are made from Plutonium 239, which practically does not exist in nature. The primary way to get it is to use uranium in a nuclear reactor; then, some of the uranium becomes plutonium.
“Plutonium 239,”
The problem is that plutonium 239 doesn’t always fission when it absorbs another neutron. Sometimes it becomes plutonium 240. Plutonium 240 fissions randomly, spitting out neutrons, which causes the bomb to go off before it should.
By ‘before it should,’ I mean while someone is trying to make it go off as a bomb. It still makes a mess, but low yield, small fraction of what it could do with any PU 240.
It’s tricky to make bomb grade plutonium. It’s not what you find in used reactor fuel.
“It’s tricky to make bomb grade plutonium. It’s not what you find in used reactor fuel.”
Are you sure that isn’t what the thousands of centrifuges are for? It isn’t just for bombs, plutonium was always planned to be used as fuel. Whether Plutonium 240 causes problems in reactors, IDK. Are you suggesting they only use different special reactors to make weapons grade plutonium?
“Are you sure that isn’t what the thousands of centrifuges are for?”
Far as I know, the centrifuges are only used to sort out U 235. That’s the other relatively common isotope that will go bang! Most power reactors work find on slightly enriched uranium. They can also burn plutonium as in mixed oxide fuel. US reactors have been running on old (and excess) Soviet plutonium for decades. It’s part of why they don’t need to be refueled so often.
“Are you suggesting they only use different special reactors to make weapons grade plutonium?”
Yes. They push the slugs of uranium through faster so the newly formed Pu 239 does not pick up another neutron. I don’t think US and Russian reactors that make weapons grade Pu have been used for many years.
You can read up about all this on the net. Last time I looked, the various Wikipedia articles were accurate.
Typo, sorry. “without any Pu 240”
My objection to Annie is political. While everybody knows nuclear weapons will kill you, nobody know that this talk of renewables that will save us will kill us in a different way. So which choice is more dangerous? Trump’s position in the very dangerous geopolitical quagmire we’re in is the right one. Regardless of the Plutonium issue. It is very unlikely that any large nation will ensure its total destruction by deliberately discharging a nuclear weapon. Accidents are more likely. A dirty bomb-via-terrorist is more likely still. America needs to roar mightily, wave a very large stick, but act systematically, however it might, to try and save the planet. Since we are already on the edge of the abyss, there is no safe place to hide. If you want a scenario that doesn’t threaten extinction, better find a different world.
There has been no comment on Gail’s ending suggestion. How about some 12v led lights? I am awaiting my copy of “Lights On” by Jeff Yago. This book is a how to for long term life without the grid. I’m sure that when it comes to getting and maintaining even a home based partial backup the dependencies of manufacturing on the grid will limit how long even this will keep the lights on. But for the few years in between I would like to try to keep some electric power around. In the long run it will again be politically correct to use whale oil for lighting! Meantime a few Iron Edison batteries and some DC equipment would be nice. Tesla was for DC, it’s ironic that Edison’s battery design is so durable.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/12/saudi-boost-2017-spending-cuts-deficit-161222142410386.html
Saudi to boost 2017 spending as it cuts into deficit. Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit shrank to $79bn in 2016 – well below a record $98bn in 2015.
Keeping the oil price up is important in Saudi Arabia’s deficit. If the oil price drops to $30 for an extended period, the deficit will jump y a huge amount.
Living with parents…
http://www.planetizen.com/node/90372/more-young-americans-living-their-parents-any-year-1940
I hear a lot of talk about how the young Americans are lazy and that is why they live at home. That may be true in some cases. But, I think the heart of the matter is a lot of these kids got degrees in worthlessness. The area they studied either has no jobs available or they have been off-shored.
Another part of the problem is lack of education in the exponential nature of debt and why it is to be avoided. So, you have students taking out loans to pay for a degree that is essentially worthless. The students are fed a lie (illusion) by their teachers and the universities that the loans are a good investment. The loan sharks lobby congress to keep these loans unforgivable. Essentially locking these young ignorant kids in debt slavery.
Why you ask? Well I guess there just are no other good investments out there so loan sharking is a way for people to get rich off other others misery. Then spin the whole thing as lazy Millennials.
Well said.
Another part of it is the fact that education — like everything else — has turned into an industry selling a product. The original intent of the university was NOT to provide job training, but they discovered that it was lucrative to pitch their product as such. These unfortunate Millennials were sold a product that doesn’t do what it claims. It’s the equivalent of a chicken roaster on an infomercial. And they’re stuck with the payments.
Right! The number of people getting education is far higher than the number of jobs in many areas. Also, even if a person gets a job, in many fields, the wages are too low to pay back the loans. And then there are all of the problems with the students who drop out.
I have done a brief study that has astonished me.
The US student debt is $ 1.3 trillion.
The affected American students are 44.2 million.
The public debt of Spain is 1’1 trillion.
The Spanish population is 46.4 million.
American students owe more than the entire Spanish state.
No wonder it’s a heavy burden for young people.
Good point!
I find the largest thing left out of these calculations are the support systems and maintenance, especially since a lot of solar farms I have encountered use very low-quality parts to keep costs to a minimum. The problem of course being that the costs of maintaining these systems go up drastically, case in point from my solar adventures this summer:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/kDTdNHs.jpg[/img]
This is a cheap 35KV loadbreak elbow from a local solar farm (being held by one of my customers who was incredulous that it only lasted six months before it failed). This is not a inexpensive issue because it took almost two months to get a replacement and a good chunck of the solar farm was down during this entire time. The failure of a single part (worth about $600-1200 bucks depending on quality) took down almost half of a multi-million dollar solar farm and it was not a quick fix. Just my repeating of my two cents.
sorry, wrong pic link
Thanks, I appreciate your unique perspective!
More parts derived from fossil fuels.
Gail,
This is the sort of thing that will never be accounted for in EROEI calculations. And after 32 years in the Oil and Gas business, I will say confidently this will get bigger and bigger and bigger.
It is not just the poorly abandoned or left open wells, even the properly abandoned wells continuously corrode subsurface and contamination will migrate in directions dictated by pressure differentials….. up, down, left and right.
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/21/texas-abandoned-oil-wells-seen-ticking-time-bombs-/
“The discourse found in blogs like this one, permanently propping up fossil fuels, will never hold as long as the cost of those energy sources remain above the costs of renewable technologies”.
Coal, oil and gas are targets of taxation, renewables are target of subventions.
Take away taxes from gas and oil, and take away subventions to renewable and see what happens!
The human being is a fanatic animal that does not keep to the reason of the facts and evidences. They want and need the lie. Reasoning with them is a chimera. Very few escape from that prison for the spirit, but they are too few to change the order of things.
I am delighted that OFW is the majority and its comments section is a pleasure for the senses.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to contemplate this painting of the Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder “The triumph of death” in the Prado Museum in Madrid, a perfect allegory of punishment for our arrogance
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_triunfo_de_la_Muerte#/media/File:Thetriumphofdeath.jpg.
In a world without ethics sensitive people only have the aesthetic.
Lots of musical instruments playing in the Brueghel. Nice, thanks.
“In a world without ethics sensitive people only have the aesthetic.”
Is this to say that the aesthetic has no power to change the world without ethics? That was one magnificent painting. I’m sure I saw it about 100 years back, but surely never looked at it as closely as now. Thanks for that.
Check out Brueghel’s intuitive(?) references to entropy (“time’s arrow”) in lower left area.
“Philosophy is the search for truth as a measure of what man must do and as a norm for his conduct.” Socrates.
This could have been the beginning of all ethics in any of the different cultures. But the reality is that it has never been and never will be.
Living in a society that does not seek the truth (without ethics) forces you to take refuge in aesthetics. It is a resignation in reality.
Men and women can not change the world because they can not change the main laws that govern it, but they can do it a little better or a little worse.
If we stick to the principle of Socrates, then Gail is a philosopher because she seeks the truth. But also Artleads, FE, Tim Groves, Yoshua, Greg Machala, Stefeun, DJ, Mateo, Froggman and virtually everyone involved in OFW.
This is a blog of philosophers !!! hehe 🙂
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/4e/01/ce/4e01ceddea28283bec8bb1fc2f37422a.jpg
” The School of Athens ” of Rafael Sanzio.
Happy Holidays to all !!!
And Norman Pagett who is Socrates, of course.
And without forgetting Tango Oscar although I do not agree with your vision of climate change. 🙂
It’s all Greek to me
Made my significant other laff though
My god … I do not understand anything! I use the translator, remember, colloquial English is inaccessible to me.
sorry crates—made my partner laugh
Let’s bear in mind that the various ancient Greek philosophers disagreed with each other about many things — including things that most of us would laugh about these days — such as the existence of gods, atoms, morality, the soul, and free will. How boring it would be to study their ideas if they were all the same.
Gracias Crates,
A ti también
http://p7.storage.canalblog.com/75/11/403668/93262892_o.jpg
Très gentil de votre part.
Great painting by Hendrick Avercamp. The Little Ice Age (LIA) did not used to be so funny 🙂
I agree. We are philosophers. Craig Dilworth, the author of “Too Smart for our Own Good,” is from the philosophy department at Uppsala University in Sweden.
I think the ancient Greeks were too smart for our own good. They made very realistic sculptures, but over time the heads, arms (and other appendages) fell off. Not built to last.
I think Crates is flattering us all, but it was a very nice Christmas present to be elevated into The School of Athens. Thanks, Crates!
The End of More may provide fertile ground for a return of the ancient philosophies of cynicism, stoicism, epicureanism, etc., all of which teach us how to live well with less. In any case, it is just as well that we are a school of philosophers here, as IF WE SURVIVE we will need to take the consequences of collapse philosophically. This is where Crates of Thebes can serve us well as a role model.
Crates of Thebes ( c. 360-280 BCE) was one of the most important Cynic philosophers of ancient Greece. He was born to a wealthy family in Thebes but gave away his inheritance after realizing the futility of material possessions. He then moved to Athens where he studied philosophy with Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 BCE). Like Diogenes, Crates lived on the streets, owned nothing, and lived his philosophy very publicly. His most famous student was Zeno of Citium (c. 336-265 BCE) who founded the Stoic School of philosophy which would later have a significant impact on the culture of Rome and later cultures and civilizations up to the present day.
http://www.ancient.eu/Crates_of_Thebes/
i thought diogenes lived in a barrel
This blog does no prop up fossil fuels. This blog merely states that fossil fuels are a finite (but essential) resource. We also recognize the reality on this blog that finite fossil fuels are responsible for powering the economy. Part of that involves building solar panels and wind turbines.
Excellent point about taxation/subvention. I hear people go on about governments subsidizing fossil fuels (“if only renewable were subsidized as much as the FF industry!”). In essence, I (and you too I think) believe that it is the other way around: that fossil fuels subsidize government. Oil, coal, and natural gas allow for a massive industrial base from which taxes can be skimmed off the top. Renewable are the opposite. Along every level of production, they require subsidy, from RECs, tax abatements, gov’t funding, etc. On the consumption side, electric cars have incentives and users don’t pay for the roads they use, though some states are changing this. A full cycle analysis might then show that indeed, a renewable energy regime is not self-amortizing let alone a source of government revenue whereas, like I said, the fossil fuel industry, so far, has been very profitable to all parties involved, whether governments, consumers, or corporations.
Well stated Augustus! Fossil fuels power our agriculture, governments and economies. Without fossil fuels there is no solar PV or wind turbines or electric grid. Period.
Correct Greg. If you haven’t read Manufacturing Consent you’ll see cognitive dissonance is part of the propaganda model.
Such is the world of post-truth. Various of the electricity cost figures in Figure 1 are inflated by 20% to 30%. We are not in all of those markets, but for most of them the actual prices charged to households are considerably below those claimed by Tverberg.
Some weeks ago our partner in Portugal told us they were considering a price reduction for 2017, to something around €0.162, from €0.165 in 2016. The government limited price hikes to 1% (below inflation), therefore price reduction becomes a market share expansion strategy. This market will get even more interesting in the coming years. The expectation is for prices to keep falling (or at least increase slower than inflation) at least until 2022 and stabilize just above €0.15 in 2015 terms.
Likewise, the numbers on installed capacity in Figure 1 are adulterated, reduced on average by 10% compared to the actual data. Perhaps in this case it is simply outdated data, or perhaps missing one or more technologies.
Naturally, serious investors base their decisions on real data and market prices. The discourse found in blogs like this one, permanently propping up fossil fuels, will never hold as long as the cost of those energy sources remain above the costs of renewable technologies.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers,_2016s1_(EUR_kWh).png
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/thumb/b/b0/Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers%2C_2016s1_%28EUR_kWh%29.png/800px-Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers%2C_2016s1_%28EUR_kWh%29.png
So many dubious assumptions and assertions to contend with in this post. It’s impossible to tell to what extent at least some of these have been forwarded in good faith. What I do believe is offered in good faith is nevertheless unintended (I imagine): virtually the totality of Gail’s work that I have read serves to discredit all alternatives to the status quo while repeatedly demonstrating, through status-quo thinking, that business as usual is hurtling us towards collapse. The quietist conclusion that her attentive reader, largely unassisted by Gail’s work, is left to glean is to sit back, and console ourselves, as we take turns reading triumphantly from a falling altimeter, that we the few saw it all coming.
As to the substance of the post, how would the net energy of fossil fuels calculate out if we include the energy costs of moving Manhattan 150 feet above current sea levels. Miami…LA, SF, Boston, Seattle, New Orleans … London, Rome, Athens, Shanghai…
Preferably locating these near a rapidly dwindling inventory of fresh, unfracked water, near a drought-proof agricultural basin, and away from nuclear plants whose cooling intakes have not been exposed by falling water levels in warming bodies of water…?
Now here is an intermittency issue worthy of our technocratic attentions, and the lag time Gail mentions when it comes to the pay offs of our investment decisions can run both ways–here to the massive cost of discounting future damage in pursuit of short-term gain.
“her attentive reader, largely unassisted by Gail’s work, is left to glean is to sit back, and console ourselves, as we take turns reading triumphantly from a falling altimeter, that we the few saw it all coming.”
There validity to this criticism. However, the answer is clear. Nuclear is the dispatchable core energy source that we must have. Virtually everything that everyone (including most physicans who are not oncologists) think they know about radiation is wrong. If people start there, we can get somewhere. Here’s a basic fact. We could have a Chernobyl every year for 30 years, and if all of them were handled as poorly as Chernobyl was, that would amount to less than 1500 casualties. (If we added 25 years on the end of that 30 years, then we should hit 1500.) However, a single coal-fired plant will give us approximately 2700 casualties from its emissions – without accounting for climate change.
Here’s another basic fact. There is over 13 tons of uranium dissolved in every cubic mile of ocean. What this means is that there is enough U-235 in San Francisco Bay to make 4-5 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. There is enough U-235 in Tokyo Bay to make over 23. (How much exactly depends on fresh-water inflows that dilute seawater.
Underfoot, there is about 1 ton of Uranium in one square mile of the first meter of ground under your feet. There’s more as you go down.
I recommend this book to understand biological effects of radioactivity. http://www.amazon.com/Radiation-Exposure-treatment-modern-handbook-ebook/dp/B00D7KLQYY
I used to be 100% pro nuclear. But the world hasn’t built more than 400 working plants. All of them with big subsidies. Yes, the power emits less CO2 (but not 0 if you include build and fuel mining).
So it appears that cost is an issue. A new plant ~ $5B. Not cheap.
The other issue is that it only ‘solves’ the electricity problem and what we really have is a liquid fuel problem.
Uranium in seawater doesn’t matter if there’s no net energy in it. An EROEI analysis is sufficient for that issue.
Until sea level rise is that bad, I don’t think we should factor that into energy return. When I fill up my car, I pay for the utility of the fuel to move my car. I also pay extra to help pay for the infrastructure on which I drive. Sea level rise has nothing to do with my present day mental cost/benefit calculation at the gas pump. If we want to add proactive costs to economic activities, well, that means MANY human activities would need to be taxed. This in general would probably slow down economic growth and keep many immiserated whereas with market-priced fossil fuels, they could prosper a la much of Asia or the western world in the past 200 years.
However, I do believe that climate change is occurring, and faster than many care to know. So really, it is a difficult choice: Raise living standard rapidly and widely like we have been doing with fossil fuels, or tax FFs and hamstring the progress of many developing nations. Is it ethical that we in the west benefited massively from oil, coal, and natural gas but then tell others that they may not use them on such scales that we have? However, say we let them harness ancient sunlight like we have; then the world’s climate is screwed. Interesting if not difficult choices.
No need to wait for 150 feet of rise. Start with cost increases in South Florida now, and in the recent past and near future. Pumps, earthworks, raised roads, salt infiltration of ground water, storm damage, beach erosion, damage to tourism and agriculture, coastal real estate value decline… Now factor these into the price of a gallon of gas / diesel used for electrical generation in South Florida, and compare this to solar / wind that can be Florida produced and deployed in infrastructures with various degrees of fossil fuel intensity. (In B.C and Quebec, in Canada, the electrical grid is over 80% powered by non-fossil fuel energy sources–which, yes, have their own issues.)
“how would the net energy of fossil fuels calculate out if we include the energy costs of moving Manhattan 150 feet above current sea levels” –
And solar panels and wind turbines have zero life cycle emissions and no unintended consequences? Remember it takes fossil fuels to build solar panels and wind turbines!
Well, Greg, at least we’re now including externalities / hidden subsidies for both fossil fuels and solar / wind, rather than ascribing direct / indirect subsidies only to the latter and neglecting uncounted externalities of the former. (World Bank puts these at $5 trillion per year for fossil fuels, using conservative IPCC data sets.)
Why build a straw man (who was claiming zero life-cycle emissions or unintended consequences? Not I.) rather than just following through on the implicit comparison you dismissed? No need to wait for 150 feet of rise. Start with cost increases in South Florida now, and in the recent past and near future. Pumps, earthworks, raised roads, salt infiltration of ground water, storm damage, beach erosion, damage to tourism, coastal real estate value decline… Now factor these into the price of a gallon of gas / diesel used for electrical generation in South Florida, and compare this to solar / wind that can be Florida produced and deployed in infrastructures with various degrees of fossil fuel intensity. (In B.C and Quebec, in Canada, the electrical grid is over 80% powered by non-fossil fuel energy sources–which, yes, have their own issues.)
As for the requirement of fossil fuels needed to build solar panels and turbines, there are various issues to unpack here, one is whether these factories could themselves be solar / wind powered (and by extension whether we could manufacture these with zero embedded fossil fuel energy) or whether, more realistically, we could imagine sharply reducing the fossil fuel intensity of alternative energy deployment. Solar / wind / hydro powered factories … Mining shovels, for example, are electric. The giant trucks use electric motors (diesel powered) for propulsion and therefore could be at least hybridized with regenerative braking and solar / wind / hydro charged off shift. Highway trucks could be powered by solar / wind / hydro cracked hydrogen or hydrogen/electric hybrids.
Scalability of course is a massive problem–these cannot be swapped in for fossil fuel infrastructure, but since that’s doomed anyway (as most on this site would agree), why not get busy with what might survive or locally mitigate its collapse?
I confirm my local data point is about correct, in both Yoshuas and Gails/Euans charts.
Coal mine covertly funded by World Bank.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/22/adani-coalmine-covertly-funded-by-world-bank-says-report
To give you a bit of an idea of how intertwined things are,
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-deadly-explosion-behind-americas-whipped-cream-shortage/511118/
Yes Keith,
Not exactly in the same line, but I couldn’t help: “ammonium nitrate is generally a very safe product”. It nevertheless killed 30 people in an explosion in Toulouse (SW France) on Sept.21, 2001.
http://azf.danieldissy.net/Guiochon/AZF-Toulouse-Houston.htm
Ammonium nitrate is relatively safe, especially considering the huge volumes of the chemical humans make and ship all over. Still, a lot of people have been killed and vast property damage done when something goes wrong. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters for a list.
Pingback: EROEI Calculations for Solar PV Are Misleading – Enjeux énergies et environnement
Uber Hemorrhaging Money in 2016
“http://www.planetizen.com/node/90352/uber-hemorrhaging-money-2016”
And I heard on NPR this morning that the City of San Francisco just shut down Uber’s unauthorized self-driving car experiment….
Oops!
“God jul”, Gail, and thanks again for thorough thinking!
Meanwhile in Norway:
3 out of 4 oil rigs are without work come summer 2017. 1 rig = about 400 people offshore/onshore. Happy new year?
Many people out of work = not so good!
I will be visiting relatives over Christmas. Not certain how much time I will have to comment.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-city-of-las-vegas-is-now-powered-entirely-by-renewable-energy_us_58594291e4b0b3ddfd8ea4e8
Interesting link, showing that “Las Vegas is now entirely powered by renewable energy”
then qualified later in the piece to say that—actually only municipal buildings are powered that way
interesting spin on renewable news
Typical but sad example why we don’t need mainstream media.
The mini environments of the Nevada desert are frightening to me, Some of them are casinos some of them prisons. Huge banks of PV supporting the life giving temperatures. Every aspect of life support artificial technology. People using massive amounts of energy transporting themselves in their combustion vehicles in a mini environment only to enter another without a thought in the world about what makes them tick.
Well done Gail. You hit every corner of misleading issues. Current accepted EROEI calculations are not right and re-using grid won’t work. I think the price of a product gives a much better indication of the amount energy used, or going to be used (profits + salaries), to produce and sell/install that product. And so PV + Wind including storage + grid give EROEIs < 1.
The elephant in the room that no one in the solar industry addresses is the failure rate of inverters that handle grid size loads. If you are running a home system that is autonomous from the grid your sine wave may very well look like a set of stairs rather than sinusoidal but oh well. Not so on big power systems that interface. Failure very impressive from flash bang perspective.
Not so at all.
Industrial scale inverters have been operating very well for decades. They are so reliable that AC output from huge hydro plants in the Pacific Northwest is converted to DC at high voltage (for more efficient long distance transimission), transmitted to southern California on HVDC lines and then inverted back to AC for use by Californians.
Failure rates for inverters at all scales are going down, but inverters on “big power systems” are the most reliable of all types.
Joe has it right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylmar_Converter_Station
I have followed this work for over a decade.
Do we really have enough to export? Hydro is maxed out. You might as well say it’s gas turbine energy being exported.
“Do we really have enough to export?”
The Pacific Intertie takes advantage of differing power demand patterns between the northwestern and southwestern US. During winter, the northern region operates electrical heating devices while the southern portion uses relatively little electricity. In summer, the north uses little electricity while the south reaches peak demand due to air conditioning usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
People I know are making their living doing nothing but replacing the burnt up inverters.
http://www.utilityproducts.com/articles/print/volume-7/issue-4/feature-story/the-design_of_solar.html
EVERYONE has trouble with solar systems. I’ve had 3 inverter failures on my domestic twin system. Birds and bats crap on them. They get dirty very quickly and they must be cleaned regularly to maintain anywhere near their rated output, which never, ever seems to live up to spec. The roof can be damaged when cleaning is carried out and cleaning can be dangerous. I’ve never looked into it but I would gamble that quite a few amateurs get hurt doing it. I’ve since moved into a new home and I have absolutely no intention of getting a solar system installed. Best use is for hot water heater.
You can understand why a direct current system would seem to be the best choice for most homeowners. Without replacement parts and a fleet of repair people, inverters are a disaster.
Yes most folks are not aware that the sine-wave on the grid is a true sine-wave not square. A square wave is low quality electricity and causes electronic devices to malfunction. Conditioning solar output for the grid takes a lot of work and money.
It used to “takes a lot of work and money” but not now. Even fairly cheap inverters can make a good sine wave. This is especially true of three phase since the power flowing in balanced three phase circuits is a constant.
Have you looked at the output of the cheap inverters? How many steps in a cycle would you consider a “good sine wave”? Name me a way to get good 3 phase from DC. You cant even get it from AC. The VFDs wont provide start amps for a decent load. If you can spin up with no load they work but start torque under load is half the reason 3 phase is desirable. I cant even imagine what the output of a vfd using a inverter input would look like. I doubt a 3 phase motor would even run on it. Have you ever in your whole life ran a 3 phase motor starting with DC power?
“Name me a way to get good 3 phase from DC”
It’s done all the time on an industrial scale. When I was young, variable speed motors were all DC. Over the past decades, most such DC motors, even a lot of the ones on locomotives, have been replaced with variable frequency 3 phase. The controllers convert AC to DC, then make 3 phase power to run the motors. Put variable speed 3 phase motor control in Google and enjoy.
PS. I am a retired EE, but I have kept up with the field over the last 40-50 years.
variable speed motors were all DC”
Back to brushes and commutators eh?
As I see it a mainstay of our “achievements” over the past 100 years is ac motors. Devices which change mechanical energy into ac and ac into mechanical energy are AC for good reason. Like most successful designs they they exploit the physical laws of the planet we inhabit.
Now the go juice that made mechanical energy is mostly depleted. In the absence of free mechanical energy the solutions for harnessing the sun yield DC power. Another hallmark of human species is the transistor. The common transistor cant handle the power necessary to just take a small sine wave and make it bigger. It can be done with FETS and scrs ecetera but
It takes a lot of money.
This is where the disconnect really gets going. We all know that money is a surrogate for energy, The technology will save us crowd now ignores that with all it takes is money.
Fiscal efficiency equals energy efficiency.
This is why your average inverter output doesnt look sinusoidal at all. To do that would take a lot more money adding to the fundamental fiscal/energy inefficiency.
that is why to get decent 3 phase power from a facility that has grid supplied nice sine wave power is about $20K. At that point facilities that need real 3 phase which is any heavy industry move to where it is grid supplied. The hobbyist goes to to the output of a VFD which has no start torque.
To my knowledge no individual or industry is using 3 phase power created from DC. It is more fiscally/energy efficient to create a facility where grid supplied three phase is available. If grid is not available Gensets are used to provide three phase sometimes on a massive scale. Fiscall/energy efficiency.
Is what you are advocating a return to commutators and brushes? Lets look at that. We have come a long way since the hundred some years since we abandoned DC to .
It probably could be improved. I would argue if we were to accept the inherent problems of DC power alchemy that we do not posses the resources to change all of the windings of industrial civilization. Doubly so with the energy/fiscal expenditures you propose
The engineers i admire have had a keen appreciation of exploiting natural physical law. I see blatant disregard for that in your proposals keith. I suppose this reflects personal esthetics.
Overcoming gravity field
Working in vacuum of space.
These are proposals that to my mind proposals that blatantly disregard the principles of exploiting physical laws to achieve a sound design.
As i mentioned the other thing that constantly shouts failure about your proposals is the fiscal/energy expenditure. What you need doesn’t exist.
The very real problems with applying DC power are just one of a million things that would go wrong with your proposals that you gloss over. Those things would require energy to fix if they could be fixed. This is the problem with even well thought out designs that exploit sound physical principles. Things go wrong. If the resources don’t exist to fix them the project fails. Successful engineers can most of their ideas before implementation. Successful engineers take great care to look at risks not gloss them over.
Your fall back position Keith is one that ultimately disregards our interaction with this beautiful planet we inhabit. We have possibly been downloaded to a virtual reality by aliens. I do not have respect for any of your positions. I could characterize them further and speculate on your motives but I will refrain. Please excuse me if the anger I feel when I read what I feel are blatant mistruths hidden by a veneer of quasi professionalism is demonstrated in my comments.
“Back to brushes and commutators eh?”
No.
The reason industry has gone to variable frequency AC motors is to get away from brushes and commutators that require maintenance. As high power semiconductors were developed, they were designed into variable speed motor controllers. I don’t know how big they get, but it’s easy to find ads for ones up to 500 hp. AC to DC, DC to variable frequency 3 phase AC. I have never designed one or specified one, just know they exist.
“To my knowledge no individual or industry is using 3 phase power created from DC.”
The Sylmar converter station on the Los Angeles end of the Pacific Intertie takes DC at plus and minus 500 kV and converts it to 3.1 GW of 3 phase power. It’s close to half the power available to LA Water and power. There are a number of other such power lines around the world. What it puts on the power lines is not a clean sign wave, but the rest of the grid smooths it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_stations
PV makes DC. The DC is converted to 3 phase power before it goes on the grid. To the extent PV derived power is on the grid and being used by individuals and industry, they are using 3 phase power created from DC.
I get the impression that you don’t understand why AC was used in the first place. It’s simple, you can use low loss, relatively low cost transformers to raise the voltage for long distance transport of the power and drop the voltage down to lower levels that are safer to use. The reason you need high voltage is to cut down on the I2R wire loses. The rule of thumb is a kilo volt per km of transmission. That roughly minimizes the cost of the transmission line and the power loss.
“The engineers i admire have had a keen appreciation of exploiting natural physical law. I see blatant disregard for that in your proposals keith.”
There is a very large amount of my work in papers, here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson#Works and here http://www.htyp.org/DTC Please point out where I have _ever_ expressed a “blatant disregard” for “exploiting natural physical law.”
“Overcoming gravity field
“Working in vacuum of space.
“These are proposals that to my mind proposals that blatantly disregard the principles of exploiting physical laws to achieve a sound design.”
People overcome gravity with rockets and satellites work “in the vacuum of space.” This is at least a $300 B per year business.
*If* power satellites are constructed to replace fossil fuels, they will certainly exploit “physical laws to achieve a sound design.” One of the sticky points of the space environment is that you don’t have water or air to carry off waste heat, the only way we understand is radiation. Eric Drexler (of nanotech fame) and I wrote one of the papers for the 1979 Space Manufacturing Conference on this topic.
If you want to read it,
http://www.nss.org/settlement/L5news/L5news/L5news7907.pdf
http://www.nss.org/settlement/L5news/L5news/L5news7908.pdf
Engineers are also intensely aware of economics. If power satellites cannot supply power at less cost than other options (like ground solar power and storage) then they will not and should not be built. This is called design to cost.
“look at risks not gloss them over.”
One of the risks is what a high flight rate does to the ozone. It had never been studied. Two years ago I talked a NOAA group in Bolder, CO into looking into it. “Erik Larson and others from NOAA produce a paper “Global atmospheric response to emissions from a proposed reusable space launch system” [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000399/full] The paper makes a case that up to 2 TW/year of power satellites could be constructed without intolerable damage to the atmosphere. Before this paper there was concern that the NOx produced by reentry would destroy too much ozone.”
” ultimately disregards our interaction with this beautiful planet we inhabit.”
Rather than work on power satellites and projects like StratoSolar, what would you have me work on? BTW, the power satellite project has hit a problem recently with respect to humans in space long term. It’s being discussed on the power satellite economics group. The only obvious solution may take the cost out of range.
” downloaded to a virtual reality by aliens”
That’s Musk and Bostrom, not me. And it doesn’t matter. On the chance this is the base and only reality, we have to take it seriously.
Sorry you feel so much anger. Hope this helps some..
Keith – please don’t feed the trolls ….
“Keith – please don’t feed the trolls ”
Good point.
I didn’t mention inverters at all. I have no idea how we will be able to continue manufacturing them. Failure of these is likely to be a problem, whether grid sized or home sized. Inverter lifetime sets a limit on how long the electric grid can last, if we can’t replace inverters.
Inverters are of two broad types: high frequency electronic whereby DC gets chopped at frequencies above the audio range and reassembled; and systems where, for all practicable purposes, the switching is carried out at mains frequencies and magnetic circuits are used to reassemble the bits into a sinewave.
In a fairly broad sense, the equiment is designed for reliability, hence MTBF even for the electronic kit is likely measured in decades rather than years. For the larger inverters there should be regular checks and problems fixed beore catastrophic failure occurs. That said, things do break, but unless you are planning 30-40 years out from here, there are probably bigger problesm to worry about.
Thanks Gail !
Wind and solar are most likely energy sinks. The question today is if the oil industry’s taxes cover the hidden subsidies provided to them in the form of the infrastructure that the oil industry is dependent on for the production of oil.
If there were no subsidies for any form of energy–fossil or renewable…?
Someone must pay for the whole infrastructure that is needed for all energy production. The energy to build and maintain the infrastructure must be taken from the energy mix production. So in the end I guess it doesn’t matter who gets the bill, the economy must in the end pay. The politicians can only choose the direction of the energy/money flow and who they decide to subsidise.
I guess that Trump will choose to subsidise the fossil fuel industry. The question is only if there still is enough energy left to the economy when the energy production part has taken its share ?
Thanks.
So how does this work?
Renewables would satisfy environmentalists while possibly hurting the environment and the economy through “not adding up.”
The environment and the economy cannot be rectified by bau, but only extended, with the environment sacrificed increasingly fast to do so.
The only way some kind of bau lite might work would be to reduce energy use by 90% (courtesy of FE)
Under such a reduction of energy use, renewables could serve for a while, but could not be maintained or replaced.
So maybe it’s back to pick and shovel to mine coal only at the local level, and using old fashioned anvils to hammer out junk metal to make tools….
Ill take #2 …. “Intermittent energy, such as is produced by solar PV, is in fact extremely low quality output” Ok first, solar is an intermittent source of power – fossil sources are continuous 24/7 sources of power. Second, solar PV is DC current and has to be converted into 60Hz AC to be fed to the grid. Third, solar PV when converted to AC needs to be a sine-wave of specific shape for electronic equipment to function properly. That seems to me to be a lower quality output.
There are a number of errors or shortcomings in your premises, which is not surprising because you have shown a consistent bias against renewable energy every time you write about it.
“(1) Prospective EROEI calculations tend to have a bias toward what is “hoped for,” rather than serving as a direct calculation of what has been achieved.”
Solar insolation data has been collected for many thousands of sites in the US, so for many decades. It is this data that is used to estimate solar output on a monthly basis. Meteorological forecasts (also based upon historical data as captured by prediction modeling heuristics) is used to forecast in the near term (hours up to a week).
“2. …. Intermittent energy, such as is produced by solar PV, is in fact extremely low quality output”
There is no such engineering definition of ‘energy quality’, so you’ll need to be more specific, especially in light of the grid network that is utilizing that energy.
“(3) There is no charge for the use of capital.”
This is not EROEI related, but payback period, which is completely different.
“(4) EROEI indications tend to be misleadingly favorable, because they leave out hard-to-estimate costs. ”
All of the reasons you cite also apply to coal, gas, and oil, so this is not a differentiator.
“(6) Solar PV (as well as other intermittent electricity, such as wind) causes direct harm to other types of energy producers by artificially lowering wholesale electricity prices. ”
Very puzzling reasoning here. In any market, introduction of a commodity will affect the prices of competing commodities. That’s the very nature of capitalism.
“(7) Electricity generation using solar PV cannot be scaled up very well. ”
Your reasoning was either a repeat of some previous premises, or vague hand-waving of others with no support.
Oh my…
“There are a number of errors or shortcomings in your premises, which is not surprising because you have shown a consistent bias against renewable energy every time you write about it.”
You should contemplate the possibility of that you do not understand really.
It would be very lengthy to refute all points. I center on 2 and 6.
2.”There is no such definition of ‘energy quality’, so you will need to be more specific, especially in light of the grid that is utilizing that energy.”
The quality of energy can be quantified in terms of its economic profitability. I give you an example. In Spain all subscribers to the national electricity grid must pay a supplement for the subsidy to renewable energy. That means extracting millions of euros annually from consumers who are destined to support a system that de facto is not viable if it were not for this tax.
6.”Very puzzling reasoning here. In any market, introduction of a commodity will affect the prices of competing commodities. That’s the very nature of capitalism.”
Renewable electricity does not guarantee the continuous supply necessary to sustain the economy, so it does not work well in a free market context because we can not afford to have its competitors expelled. The electrical supply is not an ordinary goods.
I apologize for my bad English. I am a Spanish that uses the translator of goglee to be able to communicate with all of you.
A greeting.
There is another definition of energy quality which is technical and has been mentioned here in comments. Classical electrical power is a smooth sine wave. Inverted power is not, although better inverters produce a fair facsimile. Electrical energy quality is also a matter of maintenance of stable voltage and amperage. ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6027502/6038815/06039649.pdf It is a problem with PV integration into the grid.
Yes, I knew the problem and added complexity to the system. And of course it increases the difficulties that are reflected in the final costs.
You have done a great job and I am very grateful for the new information. 🙂
Exactly! There is quite a bit that goes into trying to make electricity from solar panels usable on the electric grid.
I’m glad you pointed out the sine wave issue. I have 2.3kw solar array with 7.2 kWh nickel iron storage batteries which is adequate for my pumps, plugs lights etc and will run my washing machine, hand tools for half the year. The cold and cloudy months it’s lights only. Here’s the thing I didn’t realize until I was running my system: a one HP motor theoretically uses 746 watts run that same pump powered from an inverter and it needs over 1500 watts. The reason is the sine wave all inverters put out. Basically you need double the wattage to power electric motors than if your power was grid supplied.
These cheap inverters have a incredibly non sinusoidal output. Square wave city. it amazing a motor can actually run off a input that square, Ive seen a few as 4 steps in a half cycle. If you have a o scope throw a power resistor on look for yourself. Oh and dont forget start amps…
A potty plunger works pretty good to wash clothes in a tub.
Will, this was quite a long post from Gail, so there is ample opportunity to nitpick. Reading your comment, it strikes me as nothing more than an exercise in picking the low-hanging nits, and most of your points seem to be founded on deliberately misunderstanding what gail has stated or implied.
But more than that, you start off with what I consider a total mischaracterization of Gail’s stance regarding “renewables”:
you have shown a consistent bias against renewable energy every time you write about it.
Gail is critical of the way “renewable energy technologies have been marketed and hyped”. Among other things, she sees them as potentially doing more harm than good by distorting energy markets and representing a waste of resources that could be better utilized in other ways, and she is not convinced that they are capable of supporting a transition to BAU-Lite. If her observations and her stance were unreasonable, that could fairly be considered evidence of bias. But what if her observations and stance are totally reasonable?
If you want to accuse Gail of bias, you need to be able to make a good case as to why each of her assertions is unreasonable. So far, you haven’t even made a dent in that task. Picking nits and slinging mud doesn’t add up to anything but trolling. When are Gail’s detractors going to muster up good arguments that show where she is wrong? If they are so sure of the correctness of their position, surely that should be easy-peasy. Why are we waiting?
I admire those who are able to dismantle fake arguments.
Even better with some style.
I “know” Will Stewart from Oil Drum days. I fully expected this kind of response from him. Technology will save us is his theme.
“La Historia Me Absolvera” -Fidel Castro (History will absolve me)
In 10 years, we’ll have all the proof we need and will know who is right 🙂
Unfortunately, in 10 years we will likely not be able to use this forum to “congratulate” ourselves.
Well this is clear…even to me! 🙂
#2. I have a home solar system. I have to use a generator in order to supply stable enough electrical current to power certain tools and equipment. This is certainly quality related. Furthermore it would massively hamstring an economy to try and continue BAU off of this type of energy. Shrinkage would occur no matter what was done, resulting in economic collapse.
#6. Just stop. Capitalism is dead, it has been for at least a decade or longer. There was never any such thing as free markets. The tampering with the economy now is on the scale of governments giving bailouts to car companies and the central bank giving trillions in loans to the big banks. “Renewable” energy companies receive big subsidies while gas/oil companies pay out big taxes and dividends. One of those was working while oil was cheap, the other would never, ever work on any large scale. This is price distortion if not outright mass delusion by the government.
#7. Show me when solar can replicate itself or power a large industry like a woodmill or copper mine. Until then it’s mostly worthless to talk about as anything other than a hobby for those of us with lots of cash laying around.
Good article. It’s a shame most people will either not understand it or refuse to accept the conclusion based on their refusal to recognize cognitive dissonance. And then there’s those who will take these reports on EROEI and use them for delusional purposes. I had a chuckle recently while looking over a Robert Scribbler post where he misleads himself and others into believing that a solar miracle is just around the corner. Here is the link:
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/12/19/solar-now-produces-a-better-energy-return-on-investment-than-oil/
“Wood cut using a hand saw would also have a very high EROEI.” No where in my entire life have I realized the true power of gasoline more until cutting wood by hand. A vigorous sawing motion is just painful and burns the arms intensely just while felling the tree, never mind cutting it into rounds, using a wheelbarrow long distances, splitting with an axe or maul, and then finally walking uphill to trek it back to my house. I have learned to wield a chainsaw with the skill and precision Darth Vader would use with his lightsabre, cutting up trees that produce a cord of wood in a couple of hours. One gallon of gas literally saves me hundreds of hours of manual labor and I’m pretty fit.
“Falling return on labor for animals represents the situation in which an animal has to walk (or fly or swim) increasingly far, or is required to swim increasingly upstream, to find the food it needs. Animal populations tend to collapse when their EROEIs fall too low.” This is exactly what is happening right now, evidenced by things like polar bears and salmon needing to swim farther to mate or find food as well as the accelerating species extinction rate. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that our EROEI is collapsing with the economy/debt, oil/coal, and nature/planet simultaneously.
“The problem, of course, comes in maintaining these systems, as batteries degrade and other parts need to be replaced. It would seem that this type of transition could be handled without huge subsidies from governments.” I have a home solar system that powers 2 houses. Cost is a major barrier; I would think most homes would need somewhere around $20,000 to get a solar system with storage started and that’s if they do most of the labor themselves. The skill level involved is something most people, let alone entitled Americans, are incapable of acquiring.
I concur with your $20,000 estimate for a real world solar system with storage. That is a lot of money. Can it be insured against weather damage? That would also have to be a consideration for many in the south where nasty thunderstorms with large hail and high wind occur with regularity. It is just darned expensive and has such a long payback period. This long payback period sure leaves the door open for a lot of things to fail or go wrong while the costs are being “paid back”. A lot can happen in 20+ years.
Great article Gail! I however disagree with the 20k figure in the above comments most adamantly.
8 6v golf cart batteries from sams club $1000
2000 watt inverter harbor freight $120
PV panels from craigs list $300
PV battery charge regulator. $130
This is a significant system not a joke big box system. Yes it will take some more hardware in particular a vented enclosure for the batteries. ( i like rubbermaid containers) No it will not interface with your existing grid system for that $. It will run just about any household appliance including deep well pumps. 20k is off by more than a factor of ten in my experience.
Sounds expensive. Compare that to $10 per month to stay connected to the grid. And then 11c / kWh usage. Every X years those batteries have to be refreshed. Every Y years those panels go out. And that inverter + charger isn’t lasting forever either. I find it very hard to beat grid connection in terms of cost. But I guess on the upside you have a system that can operate away from the grid, or when the grid is down. But it’s not free.
FWIW, my house needs 1kW (avg) year round.
Could not agree more. Its expensive power. If you mess up you don’t have batteries anymore and as you see from my outline they are by far the most expensive part of a system. Many of the components can not be easily found at a steep discount. The grid is so much more convenient. I would say its a matter of personal aesthetics. Home PV power generation allows a cognizance of how tenuous all power is. I enjoy that cognizance and its effects on me. I value knowing that power is not infinite and could easily cease from both a intellectual and emotional center.
“FWIW, my house needs 1kW (avg) year round.”
Could you expand on that a little bit? Your missing a time frame. I imagine you are saying you use 1KW a hour year round.
kW is correct as in 1000W on average. It’s less in the summer and more in the winter, but on average the power needed to run the house is 1000W. (Or 24,000 Wh per day = 24 kWh per day).
That sounds like a setup that will buckle under any sort of moderate electricity usage. I’m running 24 stationary panels and 12 panels on 2 trackers connected to 32 salt water battery stacks. There’s also a diesel and propane generator tied in for the dark months of the year, giving us fuel and storage options. The system includes lots of extras like charge controllers, inverters, significant wiring, a small building with a garage, and more. We had to have concrete poured, build metal housings and wooden frames, pay for fuel, rent a forklift, use our excavator, and do all kinds of other tasks in the installation process. I’m sure we’ve spent well over $50,000 on this setup but it’s convenient and pretty much on autopilot now. It also lets me live like an average American with the privacy of my own national wildlife refuge.
The batteries stacks come from these guys.
http://aquionenergy.com/homeowners/solar-battery-sizing/
“That sounds like a setup that will buckle under any sort of moderate electricity usage.”
Been running it pretty much for 15 years, Components have changed but the basics not so much. Not sure what you call moderate, If i want to run a drill I start up a gen set. If I had 50k I sure as hell wouldnt spend it on a solar system. Probably give it away. My whole place including land house well and septic cost half of 50k. Course I did it all with me and my family cept the well, People getting by with even less for PV systems round here. Few pay for things to be done round here. Im sure your 50k system is nice doesnt mean lessor systems will “buckle” if discharge % are watched. Frankly I cant imagine using as much power as your system provides or why that would be desirable. No desire to live like a average American I guess. All of my heating including water is obviously not done with electricity.
We have a solar hot water heater on one of the houses. We also do not have ANY option to use the traditional grid and desired a system that was mostly hassle free. In the beginning we started with less and quickly got annoyed. Besides, the system that we put in has raised the value of the property substantially if we were to ever decide to get rid of it and we didn’t accumulate any debt over it. That said I doubt we’ll ever leave since it’s 80 acres surrounded by BLM land on a hill with only one way in or out; more easily defendable once SHTF.
That’s a pretty standard solar PV setup for a modest cruising sailboat. It’s inadequate to power a house, unless you’re going live like a cruising sailor.
There are many drawbacks to solar that green-washed folks aren’t aware of and that weren’t mentioned here. It uses an insane amount of silver, aluminum, and tin compared to other sources of electricity. And then there’s peak mining and diminishing returns on that to deal with.
Batteries can also be toxic or annoying as hell to maintain – watering and balancing lead acid batteries for example. We have some of the newest technology water batteries but they’re very expensive and require some sort of housing to shield them from the elements. They came to us on metal pallets and we had to rent a forklift as well as use my diesel side by side in order to get them up a hill. Again, these are skill sets and expensive tools that most people will not have access to. They also cost around $15,000 each. ..
really? I have been working in electrical, commercial and solar…etc building buildings and I think you are making it way more complicated than it is….It is pretty easy to install a solar system getting easier every year…
“getting easier every year”
The things you can’t get a way from with solar is day/night and clouds–which means you need storage. Clouds are a pain because you can get a week of them. StratoSolar gets away from clouds by going up 20 km and uses cheap gravity storage. It’s still estimated at 5 cents a kWh, which is more than Gail thinks can be accepted.
You haven’t convinced me of anything.
Exactly! Keeping prices high enough to encourage all of this activity becomes a problem as well.
And as you frequently mention even with subsidies “renewables” cannot pay taxes or dividends. It’s a total nonstarter for investment or anything large scale. It’s basically wishful thinking by all of the humans that want to continue our unsustainable energy usage. I mean really, no one wants the conveyor belt of life to get cut off but let’s be honest about the situation.
The tax subsidy is what made it do-able for me. I have a 6.5 KWp grid tied system (no storage/battery backup yet). It was $25,000 installed, less 7,500 tax credit, so I financed $17,500 for 12 years @ 1.99% (again, a special rate for solar systems). The end result is my monthly payment is about $70 more than it would have been to just buy the electricity, but it’s fixed so the deal sweetens as electricity costs rise.
After 12 years of course I’d no longer have payments to make, and if nothing breaks then my break-even point is at about the 14 year mark. Anything past 14 years is “profit” (for me, not for the grid or society…)
Relying on something “not to break” (especially something as electronic intensive like solar PV) for 14 years is really pushing it in my view. I could see a 4 maybe 5 year break-even but 14 years? That is just plain too risky to me. I live in the south and use AC. I do turn the thermostat up to 85 in the day when I am gone and 77 at night. I am not wasteful of electricity and my bill at its peak is $50.00/month for a 1800sqft home. About $30.00 per month in the fall and spring. For me personally solar would be so far out there as far as payback time that it doesn’t even register for me.
Wow thats cheap! Does that include the service charges? Those alone are $30 a month for me. Regardless your numbers are compelling.
Progress Energy offered me a grid tie system for $10,000 through their solar rebate program. The price was roughly 40% of retail for a 5kw setup. The payback number considering maintenance was so poor, that I declined. Solar hot water (Florida) using
my own design has proven a winner, but conservation trumps everything.
If you think about all the subsidies that are included–for example, all of the work that the grid has to do to accommodate this electricity, and the big tax write offs someone is getting, and the damage this is doing to the pricing of other types of electricity, the whole story is absurd.
I thought the same when I read the RS piece. I think he’s a terrific writer, and his Climate reporting is excellent, but he has an overwhelming bias when it comes to what he wants to be true about solutions (and politics).
Spot on. It also hurts his credibility with the climate change stuff because people will be less likely to take him seriously. Either way, I mostly read his stuff to find links to other stuff like actual data, pictures, news, weather extremes, and research.
…Recognize cognitive dissonance? really?
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/21/texas-abandoned-oil-wells-seen-ticking-time-bombs-/
This is the sort of thing that will never be accounted for in EROEI calculations. And after 32 years in the Oil and Gas business, I will say confidently this pollution and contamination will get only get bigger, much bigger.
It is not just the poorly abandoned or left open wells, even the properly abandoned wells continuously corrode subsurface and contamination will migrate in directions dictated by pressure differentials….. up, down, left and right.
…ignoring the pollution of air, water, atmosphere is the true cognitive dissonance
You sound mad. Did I specifically advocate for “drill baby drill” anywhere in my post? There is no undoing the pollution we’ve already done to the air, water, and atmosphere. Look at the rate of change on species extinction and CO2; there is no fixing this situation. It is madness to believe we can. The only “fix” to this situation is a depopulation event involving billions and even then it will not stop climate change. In fact, once the global dimming shield is done so is the biosphere and humans. Halting business as usual would almost immediately end our species in multiple ways. We’ve got a couple of years left if we’re lucky and I’ve seen no evidence that anything can counteract it.
I have mentioned it before. There is an easy – but maybe fairly rough – way of calculating the energy balance of for instance a windmill farm.
You just have to know the life time expenses of constructing, maintaining, repairing, operating it plus probably interest on possible debt taken to build the windmill and its necessary auxiliaries.
No doubt you remember the graph showing almost 100 % correlation of global energy consumption and global GPD. (https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/11-economic-growth-is-closely-tied-to-energy-consumption.png) Gail has shown it to us several times and I am convinced that money is nothing but the tokenization of energy! Gail’s presentation of the ‘time shifting’ system between individual is also a strong proof of that assumption.
Almost all products on the market are born in factories driven by electric energy at a certain price. I think in Europe it is about 0,07 USD per kwh.
Due to Wikipedia a large windmill farm, Anholt Vindmøllepark, cost 1.4 billion USD to construct. With amortization the final price will be around 1,9 billion USD. Plus maintenance, repair and operation 0.28 billion USD. Connecting cables off shore/on shore 0.7 billion – total costs during the 25 years life time of the farm probably 2.88 billion dollars. For that amount you could have bought industrial kwh and you would get 40 billion kwh.
Then you have to know the capacity of the farm which in this case is 400 MW. It is estimated that the actual production will be 50 % of 400 MW, i.e. 200 MW. (200x24x365x25). The farm will produce 44 billion kwh in its life tim.
So far the energy balance is 44/40 (1.1) but the intermittent nature of windmills and decommission cost are still not accounted for.
No wonder that the Danish consumers must pay the highest kwh-prices in the world!
I am in the process of installing a residential PV system on my new house. It will have a Tesla power wall battery for excess energy storage. The utility company here in Hawaii recently discontinued permitting grid tied solar (where they will purchase the excess energy produced)-this was due to problems with the intermittent power of solar being fed to the grid. The utility will allow new systems only if they don’t feed power back to the grid, but the utility will continue to supply the customer with power as needed (these systems are called customer supplied solar, or CSS). When the utility first applied this policy, there was talk of the collapse of much of the solar industry here. But the new battery systems have put life back into the solar installers. Tesla’s power wall battery was first introduced about 18 months ago. They have now introduced an improved version for about the same price and double the energy storage capacity. Assuming battery storage continues to improve, will it be cheaper to simply install stand alone solar systems on homes at some point?. Can we entertain the notion of simply dismantling the grid,starting in rural areas, with CSS systems being the only option? I can’t imagine the cost and logistics of dismantling the grid, but I know it must be expensive to install and maintain it. Anyway, this idea would get around the problem of grid tied intermittent solar power. By the way, my new system will include a federal and state tax break that reduces its cost by about 45%. Utility supplied electricity here has been priced between $.32 and $.42 per kWh since I moved here two years ago.
I would agree that local generated PV+batteries is more efficient than piping that power into the grid. But, like quantiger says: it will be a long payback period. But, it you can afford it go for it. Just the 99 percenters won’t be able to afford it.
My wife and I are part of the 99 percenters. Net cost of my system (after the taxpayers kick in their subsidy) is $17,000. If one has $17,000 laying around in a CD (as I do since I don’t trust the stock market) then figure the interest earned at 1% ($170 per year) vs the savings from the solar system ( we pay about $225/ month for electricity from our utility, so assuming a $150/month solar savings we net $1800 per year). One can play around with these figures, but my rudimentary maths skills tell me this is an argument for solar. Battery technology is rapidly improving, so I don’t know what to expect from them in 12 years. But my 2009 Prius now has 125,000 miles on it and so far, the battery is fine. I talked to the supervisor of the local Toyota repair shop about the cost of replacing the Prius batteries and he told me he did not know because they had never replaced one. So, perhaps the warranty is a bit conservative? Also, regarding dismantling the grid-would this be an example of reducing complexity?
Depreceation of the system? Replacement cost? (when subsidies probably is not available anymore)
“My wife and I are part of the 99 percenters. Net cost of my system (after the taxpayers kick in their subsidy) is $17,000.”
Yeah, but 99% is split amongst numerous levels of income and in particular discretionary income or savings of one kind or another to se that kind of system up. Only a certain % of those people can afford what you and your wife have accomplished. How many live in apartments with several other people on a subsistence level of income? How are they going to get their solar system, and what good would it do them in an apartment in which they don’t have the right to install solar? I’ll bet the % that could do what you have done is some pie chart percentage, but a small wedge of the 99%ers. So what about the one’s that cannot afford it? That’s why they have a grid so any building owner can apply to get hooked up.
So as society goes down the net energy ladder, do we just accept that the lower income people won’t have a grid. Do they go back to burning candles at night? Toast their bread over an open fire?
Well there is certainly a large percentage of the 99% that could never afford to plop down $17,000 on a solar system. On the other hand I know a lot of the 99% who could certainly do so but won’t for numerous reasons: fear of the technology perhaps, or many
would rather buy a new car or take a vacation , etc. Actually, my wife and I secured a green loan for our portion of the solar system: 7 years at 4%. I still think it is a good investment. And how many of the 99% could qualify for a green loan? The notion of dismantling the grid is just a thought experiment-is it feasible? If our government made solar more attractive-as an infrastructure project perhaps-could more people install such systems through subsidies based on need? I see the dismantling starting in rural areas with mostly single family homes. Regardless of its practicality, my CSS system simply delays our local utility’s problem with how to fund and maintain the grid with less power use per capita as more solar is installed (it may even make the situation worse as it encourages people who install such systems to minimize their use of grid power). So, what does the future hold for the grid? Will it continue to be challenged by new technology that encourages off grid power production? My personal bias (and I’m certainly no expert) is that trying to maintain an expensive and aging grid may be a misuse of our limited resources. Distributed energy systems may be the way forward. By the way, here in Hawaii, each island has its own grid system, so its perhaps easier to see the grid maintenance and power generation issues, but they are on a much smaller scale than that of the mainland.
Run the numbers as I did above. Your Powerwall has a 10 year warranty. And it’s not just capacity of the battery, it’s life-span of that battery. The smaller your battery system is, the more likely it is to be able to pay off its energy in 50 years. The subsidy you are receiving is being paid by taxpayers. Even with that, the numbers are not very good.
You have to see how much of your electrical PV power is thrown away. I would guess that it will be a huge fraction. If you get 22% utilization of your PVs I’ll be surprised. You can do some estimating. Take a look at the post I made above.
Actually, recycled car batteries are themselves being repurposed as commercial energy storage–although the batteries no longer have the performance required for transportation, they have a lot of life left.
Do this off the grid, not on the grid.
Thanks for the new article
Good to hear from you!
I wrote this in response to an article in IEEE Spectrum on December 19, 2016. The article discussed how huge battery systems will need to get in order to go above the grid-tied solar fraction that can have 100% energy harvested.
There is a much bigger problem than just the size of such battery systems. There is a problem with energy payback. You cannot run an electrical grid where your life cycle energy cost of manufacture and installation may be near or even higher than the amount of energy the system can generate. Let me outline the problem using the example of the 3 day battery standalone system being sold now. It is sometimes called the “off-grid” problem.
Solar City has a system they sell. It stores 3 days of power in batteries, because there are low solar energy periods where you can’t produce enough power. (Winter, cloudy times, etc.) That system charges those batteries in 7 hours. There is an average of 11 hours of usable sunlight in a day. (We will flatten this calculation to average for our purposes, although the real numbers make it worse than this.)
If it takes 7 hours to store 3 days worth of power, then at most, the power consumption for 1 day must be 7hr/3days = 2.33hr/day. This means there is 11hr – 2.33 hr = 8.66 hr per day of excess PV electrical generation. So, 8.66hr/11hr = 78% of the PV energy thrown away unused from that system. That means that 1-0.78 = 0.22 (or 22%) of the PV energy potential is actually used.
A best manufacturing efficiency solar panel takes ~3 years to generate the energy required to make it. But that’s an optimal installation that assumes 100% of potential PV energy is collected. In practice, it’s somewhat less, but let’s assume really excellent over 50 years, and it averages 90%. So 3yr/0.9 = 3.33 years to give back the energy to make it. Then, we have to divide 3.33yr by 0.22 to get the time required for the system to give back in energy what was required to make the PV solar panels. 3.33yr/0.22 = 15.15 years. It will take a bit over 15 years in an excellently operated installation to give back the energy that was required to make the solar energy power generation system.
A solar-on-grid installation (which collects and uses all of the available PV energy) can pay back financially in 5 years taking into account tax incentives, depreciation, etc. Doesn’t happen for everybody, but let’s accept that. In our above system, the PV part of it would pay back in 5yr/0.22 = 22.7 years. (Most PV on grid systems are sized for 25-30 years.) So here we see that energy cost payback time is ~68% of the financial cost payback time.
However, we aren’t done because we have to add in the battery. Those batteries Solar City is selling have 10 year warranties. They should have 12 year life spans. But financially, those batteries take 38 years to pay off their financial cost. Usually, cost is a fair stand-in for energy required to produce. We will assume that financial payback has the same ratio of energy payback time that solar cells do. So, we will assume 68% x 38 = 25.9 years.
So, if we assume a 50 year life span for our solar power system and no major PV degradation (which is plausibly defensible based on Swiss long-term numbers), how many battery sets will we need to replace in that time? Assuming it’s 12 years per battery set, we have to pay for the initial battery system plus 3 more battery sets at year 12, 24, 36, and 48. If the batteries are 25% of the initial system cost, and 50% is PV and 25% is installation, then your total 50 year system cost will be: Battery cost times 4 + PV cost times 1 + 3 times battery installation cost. Let’s assume battery installation labor etc is 3% of the initial price. Add it up in percentages of the initial system and you have:
(25% batteries x 4 batteries) + 25% installation + 50% PV’s + (3% replacement x 3) = 184%. The total financial system cost is 1.84 times the initial cost.
We have figured out that our energy payback period on the PV’s for this system is 15.5 years and our energy payback period on the batteries is 25.9 years.
So, 4 battery sets x 25.9 years/battery set = 103 years. Add the 15.5 years for the PV’s to pay back their energy to that, and subtract the amount of PV energy net produced by the PVs in 50 years.
103 years for batteries + 15.5 years for PVs – (50 years – 15.5 years) = 84 years to pay back the energy for the 50 year life-cycle. Even if we eliminate 25.9 years for one battery set and accept some degraded performance for a couple of years, we are still stuck with an energy payback time of 58.1 years.
So, it is probable that the 3-day system would not give back in 50 years the energy required to make and maintain it. In fact, it should incur a net energy debt of 69% of the energy that it produced over 50 year, or in the light degraded performance scenario, a debt of 16% for that 50 year period.
The more batteries that you put on this kind of system, the worse the problem gets.
And remember that a 3-day battery system is not enough to cover all the lows. It will require energy rationing.
What this tells us is that in the real world, batteries are only useful if they have a virtually unlimited cycle life span. It also tells us that any solar or wind energy system that overwhelms the capacity of the grid will have similar problems if there are no batteries. And it tells us that what would have to happen is that the energy system operator would have to lock up some kind of revenue for all the “excess power” in order to make it pay off. The battery power would only be for emergencies. Inevitably, industrial and consumer use of that cheap-rate “excess power” would grow, which would incentivize more solar power installation. But batteries would not have the same incentive, so the battery system would, inevitably shrink as a fraction of the power mix. Probably it would shrink in absolute terms as well, simply not being replaced.
Which all comes back around to dispatchable power as the core more. Solar and wind can be part of the mix, but over 10% they start to have problems, and over 25%, those problems become severe. Those problems get more severe as you go north for solar, because the summer peak is so much higher than the winter low.
As a note, solar has better utilization in the grid than wind in general. This is because of history, that solar is on homes and grid operators are required to buy most of it at some rate. It is also because solar has a very predictable pattern through the day, unlike wind. If there is a cheaper dispatchable form of energy and the decision is made on a financial basis, then wind sits idle.
One can generate tighter numbers for energy cost to manufacture and install the model system above. But even with generous numbers, it is obvious that the EREOI on such systems is terrible, and the opposite of sustainable, absent infinite cycle-life batteries.
Very good work. I have seen these terrible numbers for solar PV and wind plus batteries for a while now. It seems to be impossible to outfit the average American home with solar PV + battery backup in any reasonable form at any reasonable cost. If it won’t work on a local level is sure is not going to scale to work on the grid.
Good analysis.
If the energy over/under supply went on long enough, I wonder what the solution would be?
Power satellites (if they are built) have a related problem. If you build them out beyond base load, what do you do with the power beyond base load when it is not needed. It doesn’t save a cent to turn a power satellite off since the “fuel” is free.
As Gail points out, we need several kinds of energy. It has seemed to me that making hydrogen with any excess power is the best use for the excess, and we can feed hydrogen and CO2 out of the air into F/T plants and make synthetic fuels.
I wonder if this approach makes sense for PV and wind? Essentially, grid management by load instead of generation. Perhaps require a GW of hydrogen plant for every installed GW of PV.
Thank you for the detailed post!
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Renewables for a first world country seems like a losing game. However, for individuals, it may have a lot of utility for maintaining a certain electrified standard of living. This would seem especially true if coupled with a small farm. The money that I have I will probably spend on the farm first unless I can steal a subsidy or tax break. I know that seems selfish but if it is offerred, why not?
Are you suggesting that having the means to provide your own electricity on a farm, will be sufficient to see you right when there is no utility providing it. Maybe you need to think through the consequences of the grid permanently failing. To me your thinking, that you can remain an island of plenty in a sea of want, just because you have your own electrical power is just a little naive.
“is just a little naive.”
Bandits has it right.
Guy McPherson now rents out his famous “mud hut” on AirBnB.
http://i1.wp.com/energyskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/societys-hierarchy-of-energetic-needs-eroi-12-14.jpg
Above you see an EROI pyramid, built over a period of 20 years by Professor Charles Hall. Each layer contains thousands of tons of coloured stone, which was lifted into place used a tractor beam, a secret technology that was first invented in Atlantis and later re-imagined for the original Star Trek series. Sceptics claim that this pyramid was actually built using wheelbarrows.
The wheel had not been invented at the time when the pyramid was built. Tractor beam is the only logical answer.
Ben Carson said that pyramids were built by Joseph in order to store Rice Chex.
So Joseph used a time machine. How and where did he obtain it? The mystery deepens.
Probably from Jesus would be my guess.
Thank you Gail for another good post.
Besides energy and financial issues, which you explain very well, it seems to me that there’s a growing elephant in the room that isn’t properly addressed by anyone (maybe I didn’t look at the right places), that is the material and environmental issues, i.e. the polluting wastes and the adverse impact on other species (as you say).
In other words, it seems that the destruction of our real capital, i.e. what sustains Life, is not taken into account, or very marginally. Anyway, I never heard about a comprehensive metric similar to EROEI that would give an idea of what we’re losing globally, and at what pace, in terms of minerals and biosphere. (I’m not talking of GHG emissions, and I say “losing” because recyclability is a chimera)
You evoke taxes, but I’m not sure it can work, because taxes always favor those who can avoid to pay them or have enough money to find some workaround, and additional taxes would eventually add to the burden of middle and low classes, which is actually what we’re trying to mitigate in order to delay the collapse.
I raise the issue because all of these converters (solar PV, windmills) as well as all high-tech devices, are using more and more elements we’re likely to run out of in short span. Needless to say we’re likely to run out of biosphere as well.
Of course it should be connected to energy and financial issues (not talking of mining asteroids), but that’s another story. Anyway, I feel like we keep on considering the natural resources are for free (the matter itself) and unlimited, but maybe -if ever BAU is to continue for some years more- we shouldn’t.
This is why I love this blog. So many insightful posts and comments!
Thanks Greg,
In fact I exaggerated a little bit: there are many studies and metrics about shrinking of the biosphere, for the diminishing ores of minerals there’s probably something, and for pollutions here and there ; but not all together! (afaik)
My question was initially how do we, how can we, price the losses?
Money represents energy, not material resources, so how do we deal with priceless things?
As long as raw materials are available, no problemo, but what happens when we start to run out of one of them?
And what about the wastes and pollutions? Will we drown under before even asking the question? (Yes probably)
Maybe I should have a look at the Life Cycle calculations to get an idea…
The environmental losses will be absolute and total, including the near term extinction of homo sapiens. Some studies now indicate a +6-7C above 1880 baseline temperature by 2100, enough to not only obliterate our food supply long before then but perhaps turn the planet into Venus as well. It’s very possible this estimate is extremely conservative as well.
The Arctic has had a few days with the temperature at +55 Fahrenheit above average this year, a rather absurdly high number. It’s possible that we are now releasing methane in quantities large enough to ensure our demise in the next few years, certainly not any longer than a decade.So here’s the current state of global sea ice with another 60 days or so of melting. A blind man could determine what’s about to happen next when he runs his hands along the trend line for 2016 and notices his fingers go between that one and the next closest one. We’re finished for the most part, there is absolutely no dampening or slowing down what’s about to happen.
https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/sea-ice-extent-area/grf/nsidc_global_area_byyear_b.png
Not much to disagree with here, except what seems to be implied in the conclusion–“we’re finished” is and always was going to be true–as it is for any single individual. The question becomes, how would we wish, and work, to have it end? The end as intellectual conclusion entirely shortcuts the questions that life, and this particularly ecological juncture, poses.
We don’t have any power or control over the bigger picture and were likely locked into this situation anyways. How we process that and decide to live out our final days is within our power to decide. The journey was always about experience in my opinion; plenty of things to take in and process over watching ourselves collapse in this manner.
Tango, please stop watching Guy McPherson videos. He lies. Get your science from serious climate scientists, not a traveling snake-oil salesman.
I don’t watch Guy Mcpherson videos for starters; he mostly just posts a small blog post once a week or something these days. Second, McPherson just shows damning sources and evidence for the most part. Lastly, he doesn’t sell a damn thing and does his little presentations to audiences of >50 people based on donations. If you think he’s selling something I’d love to know what. Mostly he just tells people to live in the moment; hardly a bad thing considering our surroundings.
I’m mostly drawing my own conclusions based on observing trend lines and historical data. I think it’s quite possible that climate change scenarios will lead to a global extinction event inside of a decade. It’s really not far fetched if you look at the current background extinction rate of >200 species per day. We’re already in the midst of an extinction event and you think we’re going to be hanging out for several more decades? What proof can you provide other than a heavy helping of normalcy bias?
Here’s a newer source claiming climate change is irreversible. What that also means is that the trends are going to continue and worsen:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/donald-trump-climate-change-policy-global-warming-expert-thomas-crowther-a7450236.html
Here’s NASA saying CO2 is no longer going below 400PPM. I’ll let you try and figure out what that means for our future climate since CO2 is exponentially increasing. It could hit as high as 415 PPM by April and 2016 is going to clock in at 1.2C above baseline. If you think +55 F above average in the Arctic is going to “okay” for much longer, I really don’t know what to tell you. http://www.climatecentral.org/news/world-passes-400-ppm-threshold-permanently-20738
A major issue is that there is nothing we can do to fix the problem.
There are also other trends leading to other sources of collapse even sooner.
We can’t really fix any of our problems, including the economy. They’ve all become much too large and would’ve required action decades ago. Europe looks like they’re in trouble right now, particularly Italian banks.
Guy McPherson is notorious for misrepresenting sources and distorting evidence. He accepts expenses for his trips and, as you say, donations, and he sells his books. But mainly he “sells” his prediction of human extinction within 10 years. Until recently it was extinction by 2030, but maybe that wasn’t scary enough. When challenged to spell out just how this inevitable extinction will occur, he has a couple of tactics: he is apt to accuse questioners of being climate change deniers or paid shills; or he blusters about loss of habitat, talks vaguely of “abundant evidence” and refers to the monstrosity of an “essay” on his website consisting of bits and pieces he’s cobbled together from various sources, some more credible than others and often including quotes taken out of context. He also accuses real climate researchers of lying to keep their jobs.
He tells anyone who will listen that nothing can be done about climate change, which means, effectively, just giving up. He pads it out with attempts at humor and some cheesy quasi-philosophy. His influence can be seen in comment sections such as this. I’m sorry, but your comments could almost have been written by McPherson himself, including asking me for proof that he is wrong – proof of a negative – and implying that I am complacent about developments in the Arctic etc.
Thank you for the links. They told me nothing of which I was not already aware. Allow me to share some in return.
https://fractalplanet.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/how-guy-mcpherson-gets-it-wrong/
McPherson Panel (Powerpoint presentation)
http://www.cabrillo.edu/~rnolthenius/Apowers/McPhersonPanel-1a.pptx
Near Term Human Extinction May Not Be So Near! (Paul Beckwith)
https://youtu.be/p3Eb4k0BL8I
Already read those over, not wasting my time on anti Mcpherson writings as he’s not my own personal Jesus. You’ve done nothing to convince me that the data and charts I’m reading indicate we’ll be here for 10+years, sorry. You sound like you personally hate the man more than you’re interested in discussing the details of climate change. If near term extinction scares you, you’ve definitely come to the wrong place. Gail believes financial collapse will come sooner and likely be fatal for mankind.
“[McPherson is] not my own personal Jesus. You’ve done nothing to convince me that the data and charts I’m reading indicate we’ll be here for 10+years, sorry.”
Since McPherson is the only public figure making that baseless prediction there seems to be something of a contradiction there, especially as you appear to be in complete agreement with all he says. I don’t so much hate as despise him and his self-promotion, taking attention away from efforts towards amelioration of the unavoidable effects of climate change.
“If near term extinction scares you….”
Funny, McPherson always tries to deflect criticism by shifting the focus to his critics. Why would I be scared of something I don’t believe, especially as I do expect there to be a rapid fall in population in the coming decades? And no, Gail has made it clear that she is not expecting actual and imminent extinction. It’s going to be a whole lot messier than that.
You must have me confused with Guy McPherson. I don’t follow him or read anything he says and I haven’t in a few years. That nearly 3 year old blog post you sent though is a comical attempt at debunking some of his arguments. Like some random dude on a website taking pictures of himself playing with rocks is an authority on climate change. I think we’ll be dead long before McPherson predicts from climate change or some sort of financial crisis. As for the rest of your debate I’ll go ahead and pass and let someone like FastEddy find you since you’re of the “slow collapse” camp.
“I don’t follow [McPherson] or read anything he says and I haven’t in a few years.”
Well…, okay.
That “random dude” – Scott Johnson – does an excellent job of showing how tacky a lot of McPherson’s “evidence” is, and McPherson, as usual, declined to respond, preferring, as usual, to insult Scott and accuse him of being paid to denigrate his “work”.
“you’re of the “slow collapse” camp.”
Another McPherson-type assumption.
You need to hang out here longer if you think the anti-slow collapse is a McPherson thing. In general, you should just stop thinking about McPherson; he has almost nothing to do with this blog. I can and do read research and charts and am capable of making decisions in that regard without some PHD biologist doomer’s backing.
I’ve read through some of that guy’s stuff; I find a lot of it to be conservative and/or comical. And frankly no one even heard of him until he decided to attack McPherson a few years ago and drew people to his boring rock picture. Just because some random geologist or whatever decides to “prove” some outdated projections wrong doesn’t mean the overall thesis is wrong. In fact, some of the current stuff happening appears to be horrifying enough all on its own.
“You need to hang out here longer if you think the anti-slow collapse is a McPherson thing.”
Why would I think that? And I’ve been coming to this site regularly for years (another assumption on your part). The only “thing” McPherson has that allows him to draw audiences and attention from YouTube channels and journalists is predicting near-term human extinction, which seems to hold a fascination for some, while depressing others. I would love to “just stop thinking about McPherson” if only his pseudo-science would stop insinuating itself into climate change discussions.
Never mind whether Scott Johnson is well-known or has a “boring rock picture”. He just spelled out what I already knew. McPherson has abandoned academic principles (and permaculture) in favor of a career in scaremongering. He is the polar opposite of a climate change denier.
“In fact, some of the current stuff happening appears to be horrifying enough all on its own.”
True, but irrelevant to any claim to knowledge of when the last human being will expire.
“Guy McPherson is notorious”
I had some totally unproductive interactions with Guy 8 years ago, 12/24/08 to be exact. At the time he predicted 9 % per year decline in oil production and said that there just wasn’t time to fix the energy problems.
I think your analysis is spot on. He has found a comfortable social niche and will stay there regardless of facts.
BTW, I don’t believe what I hear about the Chinese test of the EM drive in orbit because it trashes what we know of physics. But if it does work, then the engineering consequences are that we can use it pull energy out of nowhere, in unlimited amounts.
“I had some totally unproductive interactions with Guy 8 years ago, 12/24/08 to be exact.”
Interesting. I know he predicted economic collapse in 2012, but his descent from being what I would call a regular doomer based on the science to whatever he is now appeared to me to begin not many years ago. But I do recall someone else describing experiencing some unpleasantness with him a while before that. It’s curious how his followers, some of them apparently intelligent and quite well-informed, staunchly defend him no matter what provably nonsense things he comes out with.
The EM drive is a curious phenomenon. If it’s being seriously tested I suppose it can’t be dismissed out of hand; but given what we’ve done to the environment with finite fossil fuels, imagine what we could “achieve” with “unlimited amounts” of even clean energy.
The only measure I am aware of has to do with the percentages of biomass we are appropriating, and that is called Net Primary Productivity. Supposedly, a ratio of 50% is way too much, but we don’t know if there is a tipping point lower than that. We are rapidly headed toward 50%, however.
With respect to minerals, I have run into a woman from Spain named Alicia Valero who says that once minerals are disbursed through use, they are essentially lost, because of the high energy needed to regather them. She is a coauthor of a book called Thanatia, The Destiny of the World’s Mineral Resources. I believe this book looks at the issue of mineral disbursement.
Your point about recycling is (very) correct. I don’t recall the exact figures but, here in South Australia for instance, with a well organized recycling system collecting most “stuff”, it has to be subsidized – not least because the sorting is labour intensive, compared with the “straightforward” production of new materials in bulk.
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Plastics are a major problem because there are so many different types, which cannot simply be batched and reduced via a single process, such as with solvents of various kinds for some, perhaps heat for others and so on. To the best of my knowledge it is common just to shred and form into sheets for low grade applications. In any case PC has more to do with recycling than economics … well maybe it’s cheaper than land-fill these days, but it certainly hasn’t eliminated “stuff” dumps.
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Of course I’m not saying that recycling shouldn’t be done, just that it doesn’t solve cost, nor raw material problems. Ironically when I was a boy in a family of six, our rubbish bin was less than half the size of a wheely-bin and not often filled – less packaging for one thing. The rag and bone man used to come round and the Boy Scouts used to collect much smaller newspapers than they are today. My deduction is that much less was wasted … but we’ve “advanced” since then, right!!
I agree, packaging is just out of control. I hate those clamshells they cut like a knife. I am surprised no one has sued over those things.
yes ive noticed that recycling trucks mostly cart away air
Yes Gail,
I made a comment about HANPP (human appropriation of net primary production) at the end of previous thread.
Thanks for reminding about Thanatia.
Not many people seem to be concerned about these issues, though.
The size of the problem with biodiversity can be intuited with this graph.
http://foro-crashoil.2321837.n4.nabble.com/file/n26567/Terrestrial_Vertebrate_Biomass_zpsf1dzq0rc.jpg
We are the worst plague imaginable.
Laugh for not crying.
Thanks Crates,
for reminding this chart by Paul Chefurka about terrestrial vertebrates.
I guess wildlife is not doing much better in the oceans.
Wow!
And some people think overpopulation isn’t a thing. I suppose think might not be the right word.
Crates, all in all this graph is a shocker. It brings the point home very clearly how far we’ve come in messing up the natural world.
It struck me as interesting that most of the loss of “wild animal” biomass occurred prior to 1900. There was only a small fraction left by then and it has been whittled down much further since.
The other thing that leapt out at me is that we’re approaching a hell of a Seneca cliff that is going to remove almost all the red and blue from the 2050 column. I can’t see us keeping the system so far out of balance for another 30 years or more.
I didn’t know that the Chinese had wheelbarrows long before us. I read somewhere about a joke current in England around the early 1700s: “What’s the world’s greatest invention? Why, the wheelbarrow, of course. It’s taught the Irish to walk on their hind legs!”
Highly politically incorrect, of course, as well as out of date, since the Irish generally have very high standards of education and achievement these days.
I hadn’t heard that one before!
I’m going to file that one right alongside the one we used to tell each other in the school playground about “How do you confuse an Irishman? — Show him two shovels and ask him to take his pick.”
We need to catalogue this kind of racist humor and mark it as “Deplorable!”, so that future generations of children don’t pick up the bad habits and bigotry that we did.
I had you down as a right-wing libertarian, Tim, but you’re sounding more neo-trotskyite here. You are trying to have your cake and eat it, though, recounting the joke and then deploring it . “Racist humour”? Racism – undesirable; humour – desirable. How to split the difference? Well, I have Irish ancestry, so I’m allowed to tell such jokes. Unless you have, you are not. What’s more, the Irish are not a race but a nationality. So your usually rigorous logic has failed you here. Anyway, that’s just a bit of seasonal banter, so don’t get your fundoshi in a knot. 😉
In an ideal world Tim is right. That said, our ethics do not operate in a vacuum. Like Norman talks about, the times of more are over. When things were plentiful it was easy to preach social justice – hating others for reasons beyond their control or because they are different is reprehensible, especially if we want to pretend that the healthcare system can grow exponentially with the population. Once humans are forced to eat one another to survive in the not too distant future we probably won’t ponder a whole lot how important it was to have bathrooms that transgenedered people can use comfortably.
LOL!
For the record, I probably have more Irish ancestors than English, including Lynch and Goodbody grandparents who claimed County Cork as the old country.
Of course I agree with common phenomenon about the Irish being not a race but a nationality in our modern idiom. Although a lot of Irish people might disagree with that. For instance:
The Irish race of today is popularly known as the Milesian Race, because the genuine Irish (Celtic) people were supposed to be descended from Milesius of Spain, whose sons, say the legendary accounts, invaded and possessed themselves of Ireland a thousand years before Christ.
The races that occupied the land when the so-called Milesians came, chiefly the Firbolg and the Tuatha De Danann, were certainly not exterminated by the conquering Milesians. Those two peoples formed the basis of the future population, which was dominated and guided, and had its characteristics moulded, by the far less numerous but more powerful Milesian aristocracy and soldiery. All three of these races, however, were different tribes of the great Celtic family, who, long ages before, had separated from the main stem, and in course of later centuries blended again into one tribe of Gaels – three derivatives of one stream, which, after winding their several ways across Europe from the East, in Ireland turbulently met, and after eddying, and surging tumultuously, finally blended in amity, and flowed onward in one great Gaelic stream.
The possession of the country was wrested from the Firbolgs, and they were forced into partial serfdom by the Tuatha De Danann (people of the goddess Dana), who arrived later. Totally unlike the uncultured Firbolgs, the Tuatha De Dannann were a capable and cultured, highly civilised people, so skilled in the crafts, if not the arts, that the Firbolgs named them necromancers, and in course of time both the Firbolgs and the later coming Milesians created a mythology around these.
In a famed battle at Southern Moytura (on the Mayo-Galway border) it was that the Tuatha De Danann met and overthrew the Firbolgs. The Firbolgs noted King, Eochaid was slain in this great battle, but the De Danan King, Nuada, had his hand cut off by a great warrior of the Firbolgs named Sreng. The battle raged for four days. So bravely had the Firbolgs fought, and so sorely exhausted the De Dannann, that the latter, to end the battle, gladly left to the Firbolgs, that quarter of the Island wherein they fought, the province now called Connaught. And the bloody contest was over.
The famous life and death struggle of two races is commemorated by a multitude of cairns and pillars which strew the great battle plain in Sligo – a plain which bears the name (in Irish) of “The plain of the Towers of the Fomorians”. The Danann were now the undisputed masters of the land. So goes the honoured legend.
http://homepage.eircom.net/~kthomas/history.htm
“Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-against-the-limits-of-renewables/
Thanks! According to the article, “The auction system is designed to reduce the rate of new renewable-energy additions and keep Germany from producing too much power.”
Electricity consumption has been pretty much flat everywhere. Unless there are planned reductions from nuclear, there is not really a need to add more wind and solar. I am sure that the folks who started this plan were concerned about loss on natural gas from the North Sea. I am not sure how wind and solar can fix this though–too variable.
You have convinced me. I no longer think in terms of EROEI.
For me now the critical tests are: Does it pay more taxes than the subsidies it receives, and does it make a (small is ok) profit assuming a “normal” interest rate of at least 5%?
If yes, the energy is helpful. If no, the energy is not helpful.
I watch for alternate energy installations anywhere in the world that meet these criteria and have not found one yet.
Right–that is my criterion. Any type of energy product that doesn’t pay taxes is probably a net energy loser as well as a money loser.
Solar / wind employment already exceeds employment for coal. These people pay taxes–we’re looking at different models of taxation, of finance, of economic theory–why, parts of the status quo may actually have to go!
Solar and wind are terribly inefficient, leading to a large number of low paying jobs in the US. If workers were not involved in these inefficient jobs, they could be working at jobs that truly add goods and services to the economy.
Remember what I said about return on labor falling too low? These workers are part of the problem, because they bring the efficiency of the economy down. These workers may pay taxes, but the system as a whole pays less in taxes.
I think that a bit of a short cut to what you are saying here Gail, would be to include one of your charts showing the percentages of sources used to generate electricity, which show that after about 3-4 decades of heavily subsidizing wind and solar power, these sources still only contribute a very small percentage.
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No need to project into the future. There is the empirical proof that “alternatives” don’t work.
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What’s said about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?
I made a few charts for the US, which I didn’t end up putting in the post. US electricity consumption has been almost flat between 2005 and 2015 (up by 0.5% over the entire period). Growth in wind and solar has allowed non-intermittent energy consumption to shrink by 4.3%.
At the same time, electricity capacity is up by nearly 9%, because of increases in both natural gas capacity (part of non-intermittent) and wind and solar PV capacity. Strange as it may seem, non-intermittent generating capacity is up by 1%, while (as noted above), actual non-intermittent electricity generated is down by 4.3%.
The capacity factor (in other words, percentage of time capacity is being utilized) is falling rapidly for non-intermittent. Wonder how they can stay in business! The capacity factor for wind + solar (really, mostly wind) hovers around 30%, which is far below the non-intermittent capacity factor.
I wonder if “capacity payments” are being used to add more natural gas capacity, in the hopes that it will take over when nuclear and coal are driven out of business by low prices and low utilization rates.
Great insights as always, Gail. There is indeed a big cloud looming over the sunny picture painted by renewable energy cornucopians. Back in the 90s, my electrical engineering classes at the University of Washington included a power engineering course taught by a professor who wasn’t overly enamored with PV. He listed off the sources of electrical power feeding the grid as follows: hydro, natural gas, coal, nuclear, and “toys.”
Twenty years later, even with great advances in PV cost and efficiency, and the highly optimized designs of those long windmill blades sweeping slow arcs at the top of their tall white towers, the intermittency and demand-insensitivity problems with solar and wind remain. They can take the edge off fossil fuel usage when present as a small minority of the total power production, but that’s about it. When Seattle wakes up in the morning and turns on all its coffee machines and hair dryers, the huge generators at Grand Coulee dam just get more water forced through their turbines and thrum a bit harder. Meanwhile, the windmills up on ridges in Central Washington spin no faster than they were before, and the PV arrays on a few buildings owned or managed by green energy types trickle out the same few watts under the Pacific Northwest clouds.
I say all this as someone who is worried sick about climate change and personally very interested in solar, with all its intriguing challenges—siting, storage, DC-to-AC inversion, microinverters on each panel to deal with shading issues, etc. It’s an odd fascination borne of engineering geekiness and an awareness that my own rural power grid may not keep feeding cheap, convenient juice to run my toaster and well pump forever.
By the way, one editorial suggestion: You have a heading that reads “EROEI indications tend to be artificially low, because they leave out hard-to-estimate costs.” Shouldn’t that be “artificially high,” i.e., the denominator doesn’t account for enough energy costs and thus the ratio isn’t scaled down far enough?
Thanks for the edit suggestion. I changed it to “misleadingly favorable.” Don’t have time right now to respond to rest of comment.
Right. I like the comment about “toys.”
When I first ran across EROEIs of wind turbines, I had the distinct impression that EROEIs of wind turbines were created as sales tools to sell wind turbines. I am not certain that I could actually prove that, but well over half of the wind turbine EROEIs in the best-known meta-analysis were created by the same researcher, Manfred Lenzen. In fact, he had an ad up on his site at one time, talking about the analyses he could provide. A lot of these seem to be prepared based on what the wind turbine manufacturer claimed could happen, under optimal siting, if the wind turbine lasted for its expected lifetime with no problems.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014810900055X
I have been complaining about these EROEIs being misleading for many years now.
> “Somehow, the financial returns of non-intermittent providers need to be made high enough that they can continue in operation, if they are not at the ends of their normal lifetimes. I am not sure how this can be done, short of banning intermittent electricity providers, including those currently in operation, from the grid.”
Wouldn’t it work to raise the spot price of buying energy from non-intermittent providers when intermittents are off? That is, the usual law of supply and demand.
I live in West Texas and the wind turbines are everywhere here and spin constantly day and night. So some utilities somewhere have to deal with the output from these things and convert the low quality electricity to high quality electricity for the grid.
The non-intermittent providers have a lot of fixed costs to cover, as well as their variable costs. Their variable costs may even ramp up (relative to use) when they are asked to behave in an inefficient manner. So both fixed and variable costs ramp up relative to use. This means that they need a higher average rate on every kWh they sell.
The problem with adding intermittent renewables is two-fold:
1. There are fewer kWh needed from the non-intermittent renewables.
2. The average price is lower, because solar especially cuts off peak prices. Wind is more even-handed. (It produces a lot of negative rates, however.)
I don’t think that there is a way for spot prices to rise high enough when the intermittent providers are off-line. Being completely off line is probably a relatively rare event, but capacity still needs to be available to cover for this contingency. A more likely occurrence is that there is a just a bit of the intermittent renewables.
Presently solar energy collecting devices are extensions of the fossil fuel supply system and the global industrial infrastructure. I have shared that with you in the past.
How will we use this electric energy? This must be one of the mantras for survival now and tomorrow. Imagine beginning at an earth resource –the mine, the well – and the subsequent flow of these materials. This creates a tremendous picture in motion of “energy” and resources flowing around the world.
There are multiple questions that a realistic assessment of the future of these devices requires. Each of these questions, asks about the future of “renewable” devices.
First and foremost:
What do we need the energy for?
Not, why or what do we want this electricity for.
This must be one of the mantras for survival now and tomorrow.
When it comes time to replace these devices:
Where will the energy and resources come from?
To replace components of these systems:
Where will the energy and resources come from?
As we need to manufacture the tools and toys we want the electricity for:
Where will the energy and resources come from?
Will we sequester/store the energy to provide for these future needs?
How will we do that?
OR
Will dedicated devices be built simply to facilitate replacement?
Who will manage these dedicated devices?
What will stop society from using this sequestered energy?
Will the need to protect this sequestered energy create an even more constrained and draconian social environment?
How will this electricity be equally shared globally compared to the present unequal energy availability?
How will we mine and transport all these raw resources:
the basic material for fabrication, the actual devices, the various auxiliary equipment, the tools and the toys?
More at: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-energy-in-our-future.html
Interesting questions! I think I have asked the question, “When our system fails, and we cannot support as many people, how will we decide who will ‘vote off the island’?”
If El Trumpo’s 2016 presidential campaign is anything to go by, we may start with illegal immigrants.
There have been multiple attempts to scale back government provided social services, under the guise of austerity. It has proven to be very politically untenable to get most people to vote themselves off the island.
If you can afford it, lets say purchasing cost bellow 1-5% of personal networth, yes go for it in a big way, 3ph hybrid PV system ongrid/offgrid with batt backup storage at least in dozens of KWh..
However, if you as 99% normal mortals can’t do that it’s bloody expensive, rather stick with very tiny PV system for small comm/light items and solve your electricity needs by ample other possibilities out there.
That above “truth” speaks volumes about the craziness of attempting large scale adoption of PV into the grid in many countries..
Yes indeed! The panels are cheap (in dollar terms) right now. But, people fail to see that there are a lot of other costs involved in making the electricity these panels product useful on the grid. That takes mega dollars to do.
It makes a lot more sense to use the panels off the grid, if they are used anywhere.
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“intermittent electricity concentration levels are not yet at the point where it has been necessary to add huge banks of backup batteries.” – This has never occurred to me before. If this is true in Germany and Denmark and, taking into consideration Euan Mearns chart above, solar PV and wind are gonna be hugely expensive in Germany and Denmark if they are going to increase the percentage of electricity generated by intermittent Solar PV and wind. I think I read somewhere that the battery backup is the most expensive part of a Solar PV system.
Exactly! And there is a huge amount more of grid interconnection planned.
China has a huge amount of wind that is currently offline, because of lack of interconnection. I am not sure about their solar.
For a long time I was involved with wholesale electricity price at various price hubs across the Eastern Interconnect. I was a price forecaster, mostly weekly, but also hourly & monthly. I ran into a consulting engineer who specialized in water pumping, including much sewage pumping. I explained my price model, and he exclaimed that was exactly what the water/sewage business needed, assuming the electric utility was supportive of the extra paperwork. He explained that much of their 250hp motors sucked up a lot of energy, and they tried their greatly to minimize the price of operating their fleet of these big motors. If they could get a forecast of when the power prices dipped, they could reduce their electricity cost significantly.
While considering solar PV, the coal/nuclear load decreases mid-morning and power prices dip at about the time when solar is beginning to peak. That alignment is terrible for solar, but if the electricity grid could price that to the water companies, then the off cost pattern of the solar could be matched up with the water systems, benefiting both. Large sewage plants can time their pumping needs, and the solar and perhaps wind could be the fix for pricing dips. This logic could lead to other match up opportunities.
A novel idea but it seems to me that it will increase complexity.
The metering should be able to handle this extra billing info. A very small cost compared
to the production of electricity. In fact, the electric utilities are constantly re-arranging the stack for changing costs. A lot of this is done electronically today.
The problem is not the metering. It is getting enough funds to cover the electric company’s fixed and variable costs.
Think of the problem from the point of view of buying your own wind turbine or solar panels. How many do you need to buy? How many back up batteries do you need to provide the electricity you need? What do you need in the way of inverters and other add ons?
You cannot expect that the electric company will provide all of the services you need, at no cost.
We are dealing in the world of complexities. There are a lot of things that can be done, if enough planning is done. Solar will be available on certain days, by varying amounts. Wind will appear in much closer to a random pattern. If it is possible to match up demand with prices, certain users could benefit.
The problem is that we actually need the full amount of generating capacity, even though solar can, on some days, in some places, handle some peaks. The use of the pricing mechanism leads to the situation where there are not enough dollars to go around for everyone. In a sense, this is a deficiency of the pricing mechanism. It was never intended to work with solar PV and wind, because these types of energy do not drop back their supply in response to low prices, and do not increase their supply in response to high prices.
This is admittedly a hard thing to understand. This is part of why solar looks like a good thing, until you actually see how it affects grid generation in total. This effect leads to non-solar electricity producers closing, because they don’t get enough dollars to stay open.
The utilities know what their forward costs are on hour to hour basis, always depending on load. What I described could work if the forecasted load could be communicated to large industrials.
It’s simple to micromanage these things on a small scale. In our solar setup the water pump, which puts a pretty heavy draw on the system, is set to run between 10 AM – 2 PM to align with when we’re usually in absorb mode on our panels. Doing this on the macro level seems much more complex and in many cases the interests of the electrical company may not align with those of the water or sewage utilities. Timing may not work out so well either as weather can be unpredictable or disastrous.
There are both fixed and variable costs. The utilities need to cover both. The way this works out for them, they have a hard time covering their fixed costs.
Well, then, change the perverse and failed incentives we have built. The “pricing mechanism” of capitalist markets is driving us towards collapse. Energy may need to be (re)nationalized and rationed, for example, as a public good too fundamental to be entrusted to the capricious short-termism of markets.
Kevin Anderson and other serious climate scientists are telling us we need on the order of a 10% reduction in CO2e per year to have a reasonable shot at non-catastrophic change. We’re pretty sure that capitalism (and specifically neoclassical economics) cannot handle this change–and is clearly failing to deliver what it has promised us anyway. For 99% of human history we thrived without it, and some of us (perhaps 10% of the current global population) will have to again, whether we would wish this or not.
It has been said that our social imaginary has been so heavily colonized by capitalism that it is harder to imagine its end than to imagine (and acquiesce in) the end of the world that our present system is leading us to.
We can either grab our asses, kiss the world good-bye, and lapse into an atomistic survivalism–with this website as a significant enabler–or at least try to imagine the least catastrophic paths to whatever comes next, and attempt to surf that combination of intended and unintended outcomes to the very different worlds awaiting us (or the surviving planetary species) on the other side of collapse.
This is clearly a degrowth scenario (predominantly, though not uniformly–among the exceptions being the growth sectors of relocalization of food supplies, decarbonization, climate mitigation / adaption) but since pretty much everyone on this discussion list sees some kind of collapse as inevitable, what paths of collapse seem preferable–what are the least terrible paths we might aspire to? There will be some degrowth / decomplexification paths that we can choose, can pursue, some we can mitigate and adapt to, and some of these will be forced upon us.
This will likely mean an end to stupid debt-filled, fossil-fuel subsidized consumerism (chosen or otherwise), and to the energy profligacy of the 1%–whose energy footprint is nearly as disproportionate as their wealth. Yes, this will probably look like a Depression, possibly much worse.
The Post-Carbon Institute has estimated that it would take 50 million people to produce the food that the US consumes, without a fossil fuel subsidy. So instead of the future of flipping burgers in the ecological disaster zone that we are currently promising our young people, millions may be looking at growing their own food.
And unless having children is something of a mission, individuals may want to seriously reconsider bringing more into the world during this period of disruption. We probably can’t sustain more than a tenth of our current populations without fossil fuels.
Of course we can say that politically few would choose this–but we have argued to death on this list that sustaining BAU much longer is untenable, regardless of what we might choose to keep it going.
A better question becomes how we might choose or wish or labour to fail–less catastrophically, more humanely, preserving what we can of what we care about?
Given depletion rates, soaring CAPEX costs, and the crisis of unaffordable fossil-fuel energy that Gail has worked to demonstrate, how long can we keep fossil-fuel development going without nationalizing it and / or otherwise increasing the direct subsidies and externalities that keep it all going?
So we may have 20 years of fossil-fuelled transition to human-powered, intensive agriculture.
We haven’t been able to deliver on real growth in prosperity for the masses for about 40 years, and the establishment’s capacity to pretend that we have, or can, or will, or that this is even actually a goal seems also on its last legs.
So an end to growth as proxy for prosperity. Much of that “growth” was commodification of things that had not been a countable part of the economy anyway, or have little utility (much of the finance sector), or are actively deleterious–fire fighting, environmental clean ups, fueling and fighting obesity, paying others to raise our children–or has been at best a debt-fuelled, zero-sum trade game with China–and shifting the externalities of that activity–and the build up of their infrastructure and the pillaging of ours–into what was a coal-fired economy.
Where will the money come from? A return to money creation as a public good–banking as a public utility–major debt jubilee. If there’s money for QE (creating stock market bubbles and more or less destroying the bond markets in the process), those unimaginable sums could have been and still could be made available (creating jobs in the real economy and tax revenues) for infrastructural transformation.
Next to go may be the presumption that we can have unlimited energy on demand 24/7. So, one option is increasing intermittency by design.
Demand destruction: accomplishing more real work (redirecting production / consumption towards necessities) coupled with increased efficiencies–energy saving retrofits, rationing. Demand management–contracts as in London, today, to have power interrupted for an hour or two at times of peak demand; smart fridges, hot water heaters that shut off for an hour or two. High-capacity, long-distance DC lines, particularly along the east-west axis, intermittency by design–departing from presumption of unlimited electricity demand management contracts and growing efficiencies in energy storage–not just or even primarily batteries (molten salts, more efficient extraction of hydrogen from water during peak solar/wind production, and returning the hydrogen for electrical generation in the troughs, etc.
But these are the technocratic details that we spend so much time arguing over on this website without really talking about how we care for what we care about…
You don’t understand the physics underlying the situation. We don’t really have the capability to make the changes you are talking about. The economy needs to grow, or it collapses. You seem to believe a lot of mythology other sites publish.
Exactly Gail. Growth, exponential growth, is a fundamental necessity for the current form of industrial civilisation … not least to pay the compounding interest on the debt, which is also a fundamental necessity to “bring the future forward”, in terms of resource exploitation and the production of “widgets” to keep rampant consumerism going in saturated “markets” (nothing could be much further from real markets I saw happening as a boy in England, but which are no more).
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I can almost smell the cow dung and “see” the cattle, pigs and sheep + the stalls of vendors selling sundry wares. Oh memories, such as seeing horses still pulling ploughs on a few farms. Traction engines, steam-powered lorries, horse-drawn brewers drays … but I digress, though I’ll add that I knew a local farmer with a twelve head herd of milkers, free range chickens and a couple of pigs. He was quite prosperous and had a car!! Some twenty years later I worked as a dairy farm labourer with a hundred head of milkers and about fifty acres of wheat out of one hundred acres all up … and my (good) boss was doing fairly well, but would have to expand to stay viable.
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What a shame. I’ve often thought that if, somehow, the “clock” had been stopped around Edwardian times (1910-ish) then, minus WW1, we could have stayed viable for a lot longer, whilst gently evolving a really sustainable system. But it was all too late during the late 1940s when I was experiencing the last vestiges of what “might” have been, oh including horse drawn narrow boat barges on the canals … if you’ve ever read “Wind in the Willows”, then you’ll have an idea.
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Please indulge my nostalgia.
I’m be slightly more confident in Solar PV’s future as a sustainable energy source when someone builds a “breeder” solar foundry: A solar PV manufacturing plant totally powered by energy from solar cells produced there. Plus: pretty much all the raw materials (silicon, rare earths, metals) have to be mined/extracted using mostly solar powered machines and transported using solar or wind derived electricity. One could carry this further (e.g., all employees transportation be based on renewables, all installations use on renewable energy)…. But the basic point is that there is a difference between renewable and sustainable. Renewable isn’t sustainable unless it can pretty much replicate its entire supply chain “forever”.
Exactly! Very well stated.
Agreed! And part of the problem is the tiny amount of truly renewable energy that is available, even if all of these things could be used to create a sustainable supply chain.
Essentially you are calling for a “perpetual motion machine” and/or closed system with no losses. Maybe you can see that this is impossible in principle, without any need to go into details.
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However I’ll elaborate a little on one detail, if we assume that aluminium is going to be involved in any way. The conversion of bauxite to aluminium metal was almost impossible before electricity generation was very well developed by about a century ago.
Today, because electric arc furnaces consume massive amounts of current, smelting sites must be close to major power stations using cheap energy supplies, such as hydro-electric and natural gas. It is impossible that a smelter could be run off solar panels.
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I’ve cited aluminium production and kept it simple, because this is the most clear-cut example of what you wish for being impossible, though much the same argument can be made for ALL inputs to the manufacture of solar panels – lest you can think of a way to dispense with aluminium completely.
Yes precisely. I think the litmus test is.
One the system must produce enough work to replicate itself with sufficient surplus to provide value.
Two it must have the ability to be recycled with no losses.
I’m not sure based on thermal dynamics that condition two can be meet without violating condition one. Hence renewables or sustainable power can only exist in the presence of cheap fossil fuel.
Agreed.
Here’s a material that comes to mind:
http://www.peakoilindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Georgescu-Roegen-The-Case-of-the-Direct-Use-of-Solar-Energy.pdf
Cheers