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Recent Posts
- Running Short of Tailwinds for the Economy
- Today’s energy bottleneck may bring down major governments
- Can India come out ahead in an energy squeeze?
- Fossil Fuel Imports Are Already Constrained
- Our Oil Predicament Explained: Heavy Oil and the Diesel Fuel it Provides Are Key
- The World Economy Is Becoming Unglued; Models Miss Real-World Behavior
- Models Hide the Shortcomings of Wind and Solar
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Academic Articles
- An analysis of China's coal supply and its impact on China's future economic growth
- An Oil Production Forecast for China Considering Economic Limits
- Analysis of resource potential for China's unconventional gas and forecast for its long-term production growth
- China's unconventional oil: A review of its resources and outlook for long-term production
- Financial Issues Affecting Energy Security
- Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis
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Category Archives: Energy policy
Limits to Green Energy Are Becoming Much Clearer
Wind and solar don’t replace “dispatchable” generation; they provide some temporary electricity supply, but they tend to make the overall electrical system more difficult to operate because of the variability introduced. Renewables are available only part of the time, so other types of electricity suppliers are still needed when supply temporarily isn’t available. In a sense, all they are replacing is part of the fuel required to make electricity. The fixed costs of backup electricity providers are not adequately compensated, nor are the costs of the added complexity introduced into the system. Continue reading
How Energy Transition Models Go Wrong
I have written many posts relating to the fact that we live in a finite world. At some point, our ability to extract resources becomes constrained. At the same time, population keeps increasing. The usual outcome when population is too high for resources is “overshoot and collapse.” But this is not a topic that the politicians or central bankers or oligarchs who attend the World Economic Forum dare to talk about.
Instead, world leaders find a different problem, namely climate change, to emphasize above other problems. Conveniently, climate change seems to have some of the same solutions as “running out of fossil fuels.” So, a person might think that an energy transition designed to try to fix climate change would work equally well to try to fix running out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the way it works.
Posted in Energy policy
Tagged fossil fuels, low oil prices, solar energy, wind energy
3,781 Comments
Why a Great Reset Based on Green Energy Isn’t Possible
It seems like a reset of an economy should work like a reset of your computer: Turn it off and turn it back on again; most problems should be fixed. However, it doesn’t really work that way. Let’s look at … Continue reading
Posted in Energy policy
Tagged EROEI, EROI, low oil prices, peak oil, solar energy, wind energy
2,650 Comments