Why are we still seeing EROI/renewables can't scale posts in 2024?
Posted by West-Abalone-171@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 122 comments
Note this isn't a rebuttal of the concept of overshoot or anything against degrowth. Nor is it an assertion that intermittent electricity is a direct 1:1 substitution that allows all activity to be the same. Planetary boundaries are real and we are rubbing up against many of them.
That out of the way. The whole premise of the EROI/mineral flows argument is the up front investment is too high for the eventual return of energy.
But >600GW of PV and 117GW of wind is ~1300TWh of useful final energy per year for 30 years or ~4-5TWy added each year (and the actual investment is even larger by about 20% because it doesn't immediately turn into deployed infrastructure).
This is more than fossil fuels after energy for extraction/infrastructure and waste heat.
Civilisation has enough minerals/energy to spare to invest in an entire fossil fuel industry worth of energy it will access later without noticing any major shortages or changes in consumption.
Why are we still seeing the same argument everywhere when we are living in an undeniable counterexample?
PlasticTheory6@reddit
The world has built a lot of renewables. 30% of global power generation comes from renewables. Can you point out where this has impacted the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?
The sad reality is that building "renewables" has been a completely ineffective at reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide or any other greenhouse gas.
Suspicious-Bad4703@reddit
It’s going to take megaton carbon removal scrubbers working with ambient air. At this level of CO2 today studies have shown Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are gone, sea level is 70 meters higher, human civilization is underwater and our largest and greatest cities and achievements are gone.
Now, net zero is bullshit, negative carbon is the only thing that will save global industrial society. Will it happen?
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
i saw a studys where the average model is that the east antarctic icecap will remain semi stable up to 800ppm but that once gone, its a hysterisis, and ice might not reform until 400ppm.
Suspicious-Bad4703@reddit
At this rate, I could see us crossing it in my lifetime. I’m in my late 20s for reference
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
i have hope that we wont cross it in our lifetimes, im similar age. i think collapse of global industry will also collapse emissions and i think this will indeed happen sooner rather than later. this will slow the rise in co2.
however we've probably passed the point of no return when it comes to the long term (1000+ years) because of feedback loops like permafrost, ecosystem death, clathrates etc...
idk tho i could be wrong but might as well neck ourselves if it hits 800ppm in our lifetime. not sure i have the heart and the guts to face up to that apocalypse even if im all sorted with a bunker or whatever.
EdibleScissors@reddit
The loss of aerosol emissions will have a more immediate effect of rapidly increasing the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth. I think the amount of cooling effect that aerosols have is in the neighborhood of 0.5 to 1 C, which puts us in a pretty bad place if/when the aerosols go away, which will take no longer than a month after aerosol emissions stop.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
tbh i havent seen any model suggest more than 1°c from aerosol cooling.
new2bay@reddit
It will not. Thermodynamics tells us that taking carbon out of the atmosphere takes almost as much energy as putting it there in the first place. CO2 is a really stable molecule, and getting it to chemically react with anything, much less at scale, is not trivial.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
This argument also requires there to be no cheap, scalable source of energy that can be comitted to this task.
If renewables are a step up the energy ladder rather than down, then it becomes thermodynamically possible. We know they are a step sideways for some uses at least, so there is some hope they could be a step up for this specific application.
Additionally serpentization is exothermic, so an argument from the second law alone does not really hold water (this does not rebut your general point about practicality, cost and motivation though, direct air capture is not at all evidently achievable so I agree with your conclusion if not reasoning).
new2bay@reddit
None of that matters until you can come up with 1598 kJ/mol to break all the C=O double bonds. Okay, so you don’t have to break literally every one, but close enough.
Meanwhile, if we want to live on this planet sustainably, we’re limited to approximately the amount of energy we get from the sun. Average amount of energy reaching the planet’s surface is currently around 21.6 MJ / m^2, so that’s not theoretically a huge problem. But how do you harness that energy without heating up the atmosphere?
Oh, and a gigaton of CO2 is about 2.27 x 10^13 moles. So, 1598 kJ times 2.27 x 10^13 moles is 3.63 x 10^16 kJ, just to break down 1 gigaton of CO2. I hate to tell you this, but that’s about 60% of the yield of the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested by the US.
We’re boned, bro.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Serpentization is exothermic and exentropic and mined and crushed olivines out-mass the CO2 in the atmosphere significantly. This is where the energy comes from. You can even use it to make warm water for heating in winter (although you have to live near an iron mine or an olivine formation you can frack) so it has some very small economic use.
This in no way makes it practical, but your thermodynamic argument is completely invalid because serpentization is exothermic. Comparing to nuclear is also very misleading. Every atom that has ever fissioned is about equal to a year of energy use.
You harness the energy with a solar panel. They produce no new heat at all when placed over water, grass or dark rock once you including albedo drop and emissivity. You also substantially reduce energy consumption of the top 10%
Ideally you also find a way of getting rid of the silver and indium from the solar panel (this exists commercially but at small scale)
new2bay@reddit
So goddamn what? You want to take CO2 and produce methane out of it, at scale? Talk about out of the frying pan and right into the fire 😂
sg_plumber@reddit
CH4 is just the initial step. More complex and useful hydrocarbons come next.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
It's a miniscule quantity because the other pathways dominate so largely irrelevant in this case unless you can't get rid of it (but you can if you don't want it and it is useful if you do, so the "methane scary" argument falls flat).
sg_plumber@reddit
I'm no chemist, but: Terraform Industries Master Plan
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
A lot of these types of CCS schemes fall down with close analysis. I think this one is probably legitimate, but it may be off topic because it appears to use electricity as a feedstock, whereas the exothermic serpentization process needs no energy input (and thus is a counter-example to the claim that the CO bond needs to be broken with an external energy input).
sg_plumber@reddit
Ah, yes, a very different claim.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Serpentization produces a solid. And hydrogen is not methane.
Olivine + CO2 -> serpentine + h2 + heat
Again, it's not a panacea, but it fully disproves your thermodynamic argument.
new2bay@reddit
Bzzzt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinization#Methane_and_other_hydrocarbons
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Almost like chenistry isn't completely black and white rules with a single step.
Just don't let the methane out of your reaction region.
Or do you also think it's thermodynamically impossible to turn methane into a liquid or solid or back into CO2 to let other pathways happen?
sg_plumber@reddit
Cheap at 10 times the price!
J-A-S-08@reddit
So, I'm not super up on physics or chemistry. So be gentle if what comes next is seen as ignorant.
Wouldn't that, that it takes the same amount of energy to get it out as it was putting it there, only apply if we were trying to convert it back to the original substance? We're not trying to take every single component of combusting gasoline and then turning it back into gasoline. We're only trying to capture a portion of the combustion process?
What am I missing?
sg_plumber@reddit
You're missing nothing but some worthless blinders too many people have. You're asking the right questions.
You reward: doing useful chemistry with CO2 takes a bit more energy than producing it in the first place. Which makes it expensive, not impossible. Plants do it all the time. We want to do it somewhat faster, so we'll need to use a sizable fraction of all that abundant cheap energy solar PV is gonna make for us.
In short: capturing and using CO2 is much much cheaper than letting our only planet burn. But it also has great potential to yield many useful hydrocarbons (syn-fuels, sugars, alcohols...) that would make the entire endeavor profitable. Many startups are doing it already. Some are scaling it up.
It's only a matter of time.
sg_plumber@reddit
Plants do it all the time. Remember where fossil fuels come from.
Industrial chemistry is also doing it, and scaling it up fast. For benefit.
Suspicious-Bad4703@reddit
So begin speculating on Antarctic real estate, because it’s about to be very valuable.
batture@reddit
The issue is that creating more renewables does not lead to lower fossil energy usage, it just increases the total amount of energy used by society because oil is just so efficient you just know that people will continue to burn it even if we magically built the infrastructure to power up the entire world through wind and solar power tomorrow. Even if there was nothing useful to do with all that extra energy they would just dump it into some bullshit crypto mining factories or whatever.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
This is an interesting take.
Oil is about $70/barrel right now. Or about 4c/kWh of heat. It also takes 0.2 to 0.5kWh of heat to get it out of the ground and move it around.
An pre-subsidy solar panel from europe or india or southeast asia with a battery is about $1/watt once delivered and installed (but not connected to a grid).
This is about 2.5c/kWh of electricity over its lifetime in median conditions. Or about 5c/kWh if we take into account that things in the future are not valued the same as things now.
The chemical energy storage is a pretty big advantage, but can we actually be sure people will continue to prefer 1kWh of heat to 1kWh of electricity? Is the electricity unsuitable for substituting in all tasks when the oil runs out or people are not allowed to use it?
-gawdawful-@reddit
Where are you getting $1/watt installed with battery? That’s nowhere near the cost for solar in the US.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Everywhere in the developing world where they aren't taxed and riddled with fees for middle men. Very small scale balcony systems in europe are about the same (limited to 800W peak output to the AC side, but you can feed more into the battery and use it later). Similar for small off grid agricultural systems in lower cost of living EU countries. Low cost DIY off grid systems in the US are about the same (but don't come with any installation, see signaturesolar for a source).
The vast majority of the cost in the west is tarriffs, middle men, scammers, and grovelling for permission to connect it (some developing countries are taking similar measures). This is not intrinsic any more than a 80c/litre petrol tarriff is and doesn't apply to the majority of humanity.
-gawdawful-@reddit
Yeah I wouldn’t touch signaturesolar’s stuff with a ten foot pole. You know the higher cost of goods in the West is because we have higher labor costs, not because other countries don’t have taxes and sales people, right? I guess if you want to ignore the huge market share of renewables in the developed world, you can make the EROI look as pretty as you want!
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
I don't really see how labour cost relates to energy input. And there is nothing wrong with hyundai modules or eg4 electronics.
The context is the majority of humans (who do not enjoy high labour value even now) in a degrowth world (where there are not a privileged few hogging 99% of the resources).
The only relevant change is the developing world mostly has much higher insolation than eastern china, eastern US and europe. This would raise median CF from 16% to 20-25%
-gawdawful-@reddit
Why would labor costs not be factored into EROI? Human labor counts for nothing in the costs of energy that humans produce? Huh?
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
However you want to play with the details, the input had an upper bound of all the energy used last year. And the output is the average output of the manufactured and installed equipment over its lifetime.
Expected output over system lifetime is accepted as a measure of output as part of the premise for calculating eroi, so we know that -- accirding to the assumptions needed to state the eroi of renewables is to low and whatever the details are -- 145,000TWh of heat energy can result in at least 40,000TWh of electricity whilst also powering everything that 145,000TWh of heat energy normally powers. I was using a conversion of about 4:1 between heat energy available at the well head and useful work performed, but make whatever assumptions you want about the exergy-return-on-energy-invested of fossil fuels that you wish, it doesn't really change that the exergy out is much much larger than the exergy in (by so much that nobody noticed).
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Very simply, renewables are adding 1/30th to the total each year (with ~ 29/30ths of that year's total delivered in subsequent years), but consumption is rising more than 3.3%
Which speaks to the initial sentence. Renewables are not a get out of jail free card even if we now know they are at least as scalable as fossil fuel infrastructure (even excluding the fuel requirements).
My bugbear is with people still making an argument that there is a scaling limit based on EROI or based on mining requirements being dramatically higher.
It also means we now have to consider a world with too much renewable infrastructure as a possibility.
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
Maybe you can put your bugbear to bed when it actually happens.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Simon-Michaux-2/publication/351712079_The_Mining_of_Minerals_and_the_Limits_to_Growth/links/60a62816a6fdcc3507dd1b4b/The-Mining-of-Minerals-and-the-Limits-to-Growth.pdf
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
It...did happen though. It's still happening now. That's my entire point.
And "renewables + storage cannot meet 100% of needs with no behavior change" is a completely different hypothesis to "renewables need too many minerals to ever produce enough energy and have below breakeven eroi".
It's also deeply incorrect and riddled with sources that don't refer to modern equipment and bizarre assumptions, but that is even more off topic.
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
I'll await to read your rebuttal as is normal scientific discourse.
3wteasz@reddit
It's not a paper, it's a report.
unnamedpeaks@reddit
What is the report you are referring to?
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Anything from Michaux. There's a reason it's not peer reviewed and what little credibility he had evaporated last year.
unnamedpeaks@reddit
I've yet to see anything remotely credible that disputes his claims, so if you have sources please share.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
...read his not-enough-minerals paper? Look at the sources and see that they refer to decades old technology made of completely different materials? See the absurd assumptions about durations of battery storage required to feed an electrolyser. Compare the minerals required to the mass of an off grid PV system and see that they mismatch by orders of magnitude. Compare the electricity requirement he predicted for norway with reality.
It's very obviously self-rebutting.
Moreover the entire thing is not at all an argument that "renewables are not a mineral-efficient way of generating power" it is arguing that "providing the last 5% of a steady load with renewables is prohibitive". These are completely different points and say nothing about an eg. 5% fossil fuel powered civilisation or one that shifts activity with time.
og_aota@reddit
For starters: wrt "power," Energy≠Fuel. And then in addition, or perhaps even superceding that issue, there is the long-established and uncontested reality of Jevons Paradox to contend with as well.
PlasticTheory6@reddit
They use the word "power" when it comes to electricity, like they do in power transmission, power distribution, because its instantaneous. You don't have watt-hours (energy rate*time) coming into your home, you have watts (energy rate).
TotalSanity@reddit
Power is energy transported or converted per unit time. Renewables generated 30% of global electricity, not global power.
Open_Ad1920@reddit
You cannot adequately replace liquid fossil fuels with electricity-based renewables, full stop. The rest is meaningless without sufficiently addressing how we currently power out global civilization and how we expect that to change.
Fertilizer:
Fertilizer from the Haber/Bosch process, along with diesel fuel for cultivation and transportation, are exactly how we’ve managed feed 8 billion people. This number would be entirely unsustainable without our civilization having become a detritivore, feeding off the oil energy of things long since dead. There is no renewable replacement for the current fertilizers, most of which we generate from natural gas and coal.
We sent ships to mine all the world’s bird poop when we ran out of fertilizer the first time. Now we’ve drilled and dug into the earth to find more fertilizer… and that’s that. We don’t have a third source sufficient for this many people.
Humanure, for example, could be helpful with the fertilizer problem, but pharmaceutical contamination makes that currently impossible. We already have severe water contamination from pharmaceuticals that is reducing fish populations in freshwater estuaries due to birth control meds and endocrine disruptors. Human fertility issues have also sprung up from those same contaminated water sources. Humanure is banned from use in food supplies in the developed world because it’s a more direct and potent pathway for those same contaminants.
We can have meds for 8 million people, for anything that ails you, or we can drastically cut back on medication usage and have uncontaminated water, as well as return to the old practice of recycling nutrients from our own waste. Pick one…
Liquid Fuel:
There is no energy source that can replace the diesel used in cultivation and transportation of foodstuffs. None…
For example, hydrogen, (green, blur, gray… pick your color) is now being touted as the next “green fuel.” Problem is, it’s an energy carrier, not an energy source. We don’t have nearly the resources to scale hydrogen production up to the needs of industrialized agricultural and food transportation anyways.
Electrification is another example; just look at the battery resource requirements… we couldn’t even come close to making the batteries required to grow and transport food! Are we expecting run tractors and trucks off extension cords?
Cultural Mindset:
ANY TECHNOLOGY is merely a way to change old problems into new ones. We need to STOP with all the techno-hopium BS that PROMOSES the next round of technology will solve all our problems THIS TIME, especially the ones that the last round of technology fixes created…
Our “solution” needs to be to learn some serious self control. Learn to live modestly. Learn to manage our global population size in a humane manner. Learn to work with natural resource limitations and natural processes. Do all of these things instead of deploying ever-more technology to “manage” nature and “overcome” boundaries. THIS sort of thinking might actually work.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Absolutely all of these things.
But if the most marginal people increase their final energy use from 100W to 500W while the most wealthy go from 5kW to 500W we still need those 5TW or so and there is nowhere near enough forest left to provide firewood for cooking.
If we posit for a second that renewables are a step up the energy ladder, then we need a serious and rational discussion about what the end-point is and what a renewable powered world will look like at steady state rather than leaving "infinite growth" as the only strategy on the table.
Open_Ad1920@reddit
I do fully agree with your idea that we need to define the end point and create a workable plan to get there (within the time and resources available). I think most people are lost in all this because 1) they don’t know where civilization is with regard to resource constraints, and 2) they don’t even know what a reasonable end state might look like.
As you stated, the alternatives to this planned approach aren’t exactly what most people would want… That realization alone spurs a lot of emotionally charged discussions.
Also, I think a lot of the arguments you do see are often more of a battle of emotions and partially informed opinions that may often be in good faith, even if not technically correct. It’s just that our global culture has misled so many people in so many ways.
I appreciate the polite response from you, at least. One DM I just saw wasn’t exactly so considerate… Started with an insult, made an incoherent argument, and ended with another insult. The person was clearly emotionally disturbed by what I posted. I mean… I feel sorry for everyone who’s going to be blindsided by all this. We’re either going to have a meaningful conversation and take action or we’re going to go through some awful times.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
I will also say that syn-fuels also come back in scope if energy is back in scope. The energy source becomes the sun, and the equipment stays the same.
They are out of scope for my argument though. The evidence I presented doesn't suggest that electricity->chemical->heat->work can be eroi-positive using a combustion engine.
That said, there are (limited) sources of renewable or carbon negative combustables. Wastewater methane is an example. A suitably sober discussion could tap those for some subset of very difficult applications.
It is also possible to come closer to breakeven by producing the syn-fuel in a region with very good renewable resource. The Atacama has nearly double the current median, so your syn-fuel process can be 50% efficient and still come out ahead (still not quite enough to save our diesel engine powered by an alkaline electrolyser -- and PEM is mining limited). It may be possible to support these uses if they are a small enough fraction of the whole.
Re. Batteries. I think you might be very out of date. The full-system argument above includes about 6 hours of LFP. You cannot double count it of course (so the tradeoff may be no videogames, driving or work during dunkelflaute), but this is sufficient for well-coordinated industrial activity. Battery tractors exist. Battery 240t mining trucks are being used in western australia because they are much cheaper (charged by solar during the day and gas at night so not all sunshine and roses). Battery semi trucks exist at a 10% payload penalty.
Moreover, there is substantial progress towards all-abundant options.
Silver free xor copper free xor indium free PV exist commercially today. Combining all three (not real now, but maybe possible) would them very low mining-impact (the hole being about the same size as the PV module) as it would all be C,H,O,N,S,Al,Si.
5kg per kW of synthetic quartz being the only thing required here that isn't already in the EROI budget (currently sourced from extremely large but finite piles of natural quartz where the mining energy and money was already spent to acquire mica long ago). We know synthetic quartz is possible, we also know the energy consumption is fairly small compared to a PV panel's lifetime output, but we cannot include it in the whole-system analysis because the world does not produce 3 million tonnes of synthetic quartz.
Similarly Prussian white sodium batteries exist today. Also the same element set. Also quite cheap (though more than LFP)
With a very small suspension of disbelief (someone can combine the silver-free PV and the indium-free PV and make it scale, and PBA batteries scale), we have a way of powering your tractor that requires much less mining than making an ICE tractor.
Open_Ad1920@reddit
I’m not arguing that battery powered vehicles don’t exist or aren’t feasible in certain situations, so you’re refuting a different point altogether. I’m arguing that these things don’t scale. You’ll need to show the math on scalability if you want to argue for battery powered things and electrification of our current society. Pointing out some examples of a specific application may demonstrate promise, but that doesn’t demonstrate scalability, which is exactly the problem nobody has an answer to at the moment.
For example, to operate a single row-crop tractor for even 6 hours we’d be talking about at least a 1 megawatt-hour battery bank at a cost of about a half million dollars. I grew up spending my summers working on farms and I understand the economics behind the business. Nobody in even the wealthiest of countries can afford this.
Also, the environmental impact of technology tends to correlate closely with monetary cost… All this technology (batteries, grid expansion, electricity generation increases) comes with embodied energy, embodied pollution, and embodied waste. Simply put, the environmental impact of producing these things has a cost that nature itself can’t afford.
For example, those battery-powered semi trucks have a range of about 200 miles on relatively flat terrain until they’d need to recharge. That’s roughly a third to a fifth of the current range that most semis operate with. The charging infrastructure required to support these would be some four times the current number of filing stations. Next, and this is the real hurdle, the power grid to support electrification of diesel and gas would need to be roughly SIX TIMES the current capacity. We’ve already run out of land to appropriate for human use and now we’re exasperating the problem with things to generate ever more electricity; solar fields, more minerals extraction, wind and hydro that negatively impact wildlife populations, pollution from industrial processes to create and maintain all this, etc.
We’ve altered and appropriated such vast swathes of nature and caused such environmental contamination and burden on natural services that insect, fish, and mammal population have been at least some 70+ percent reduced, mostly in just recent decades. Now, you’re proposing mineral extraction and electricity grid expansion some six times above what we currently operate with? It doesn’t add up. We MUST reduce consumption DRASTICALLY for any of the things you point out to work. The environmental burden is too great otherwise.
Show me how all this scales to replace oil & gas in a sustainable manner, whilst accounting for all of the externalities and I will be more than happy to admit I’m completely wrong. I REALLY wish I was completely wrong.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Land use is vastly overblown.
There are currently around 1.5 million km^2 used for biofuel production. Adding wind turbines and agrivoltaic panels (at 30% shade ratio) to this only this land would produce 30TW of electricity (2-6x global fossil fuel output depending on use-case) and you would still get 70-95% of your biofuel (of course you'd need to use some different land because not all of this is in the right place, but it's illustrative).
LFP batteries are currently trading at $68/kWh in a pack at the commodity level. So $70k for your tractor battery, $150k once the vehicle manufacturer takes their cut. Sodium ion are aiming for $40/kWh.
Your battery semi trucks are also out of date. Scania, Volvo and Mercedes all have 600kWh models that get 1.2-1.6kWh/km. They can charge 10-80% in 45 minutes on existing infrastructure or 5%-90% on MCS chargers being released this year. So that's 7-9 hours driving at 90km/h.
Globay the rate of battery production is around 2TWh/yr and new batteries last ablut 15yr with minimal degradation. So we know that with current mineral flows sustained until steady-state VRE + battery production scales to the same 5TW of transport/electricity/low grade heat that fossil fuels could provide and storing it for 6 hours also scales.
Moreover we know the environmental effect of generating an entire civilisation of energy with 6 hr storage doesn't have any detectable environmental effect which is distinguishable from the noise of the existing fossil fuel system. Which is not to say it is necessarily sustainable, but we do now know that the impact is small compared to status quo.
For an idea of grid strain, look at norway. They've shifted about 1-2GW of fossil fuel heat and transport energy to electricity each year for the past few years (as well as some hundreds of megawatts of industrial FF), and the effect on the 25GW peak grid is not just indistinguishable, but appears to be going down in summer, spring, and in winter (ruling out heating load as an explanation).
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=NO&interval=year&legendItems=my1y8&year=2024
There are confounding factors, but we know their entire economy didn't half-vanish so we know the effect on peak power is vastly smaller than the commonly touted expectation.
Open_Ad1920@reddit
Land use is overblown? I don’t even know where to begin with you on this one. Please tell me I’m misunderstanding your point here…
You’re telling me that a high charge/discharge rate battery of 1 MW capacity can be marketed for $150,000. Show it. Show me a battery pack, packaged and configured for mobile use, that I can buy for this amount. This is nowhere near market price of the as-delivered product, in the field ready to use. Also, we’re talking about cells graded for that kind of use, not the downgraded cells that are essentially cost recovery for manufacturing.
You claim that “existing infrastructure” can charge a 600 kWh battery 70% in 45 minutes. That’s a 560 kilowatt power connection!!! Most residential and light industrial connections are 72 kilowatts max, not accounting for power factor and conversion losses. Most medium industrial businesses connections support a maximum of about 320 kilowatts. That doesn’t even meet the fast charging demand for a single truck, let alone all the units that would be there at any given time.
Additionally, rapid charging of just about any battery technology, including all in use for transportation today, severely reduces the overall lifespan. You’re not using these industrially, with rapid charging, for 15 years. Maybe 5 years, at best. We’re talking a 2,000 cycle lifespan, at the VERY best, not the 6,000-plus cycle lifespans that are inevitably quoted assuming slower charging rates.
I said 200 mile range and you’re saying numbers that work out to a roughly 240 mile claimed range, assuming average range and 90% battery utilization. That makes my information “vastly” out of date… um… ok. That range puts your 55 mph average at just over 4 hours of useful travel time, not even close to “7-9.”
The Scandinavian countries have moved a lot of energy-intensive industries outside their borders, so their energy consumption figures look better than they really are.
I could go on, but you really need to look these topics in more detail. The numbers you quote are “optimistic,” to say the least. My original point still stands, so far as I can see.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
You claimed that the direct land use for wind and solar was prohibitive compared to a fossil fuel system.
The land currently used for growing biofuels for a tiny fraction of the road fuel can easily hold enough wind and solar to produce far more energy than our civilisation uses collectively. And this land can do that without significant decrease in crop productivity.
There are specific locales where land use for VRE is disputed, but the actual amount of land needed (completely ignoring rooftops which can provide a quarter to half) is two orders of magnitude less than we waste by eating beef rather than plants or chickens.
Your demand is also ridiculous. You are not a tractor or car manufacturer and the orders for batteries at this price will take a year or two to make it to market. You can buy 1MWh of batteries and 33 car bodies for about $330k though https://carnewschina.com/2024/03/06/2024-byd-dolphin-mini-seagull-starts-at-9700-usd-in-china/ which is more than sufficient to disprove your assertion that it could not be under $1 million. You could also ring up one of the manufacturers and get a quote for a truck.
Truck drivers take a break, and you've repeatedly rounded down. 600kWh at 1.2kWh/km is comfortably 300 miles. A 45 minute break adds another 200. That is 9 hours (more because the driver will spend time not at 55mph).
Handwaving about "scandanavia imports more" might explain the slight decline, but does not explain where the 8GW average power from gas space heating and motor fuel went, nor where the 20GW of peak hour charging that is meant to occur because vehicles all charge together went.
Open_Ad1920@reddit
Your arguments are literally doing what you’re accusing me of doing (cherry-picking and skewing).
Example: Your 300 mile range assumes the LOWEST END (1.2 kWh/km) of the energy consumption figures, which you yourself provided, and for a speed of 55 mph at that.
Here’s the calculation, using the average of your figures:
1 / 1.4 kWh/km * (600 kWh * 90% utilization) * .6214 km/mi = 239.7 mile range
I did not use the more pessimistic figure of 1.6 kWh/km, as you stated. That would be the following:
1 / 1.6 kWh/km * (600 kWh * 90% utilization) * .6214 km/mi = 209.7 mile range
Furthermore, trucks don’t drive in the US at 55 mph. That IS the overall time-average between destinations, but It’s not the average speed while driving, which is closer to 65 for long haul routes. If you look at the numbers realistically then you’ll see that a real-world range for those trucks IS circa 200 miles, again I’m being optimistic here, as you can see from the below calculation (accounting for the fact that wind resistance increases by the square of velocity):
1 / 1.4 kWh/km * (600 kWh * 90% utilization) * 1/(65 mph / 55 mph)^2 * .6214 km/mi = 171.6 mile range
I was being optimistic with stating a 200 mile range. This is by YOUR cited figures, using REALISTIC assumptions. You are literally pulling a 300 mile range from this:
1 / 1.2 kWh/km * (600 kWh * 90% utilization) * .6214 km/mi = 279.6 mile range
You then HEAVILY rounded up to get an even 300 to make it sound even better and seem as though I’m way off.
Look, I’m not going to bother going back and forth with every conceivable point you can come up with, and then counter using your creative math, hyperbole, and dismissive language.
You’re apparently not trying to engage in an intellectual discussion to find the truth. You are apparently trying to support your mental health by arguing that civilization isn’t in as bad of a place as posts on this sub make it out to be. I simply cannot help you with what you’re after. I’m only going to be honest and there will be very little pleasantries about what you’ll hear from me. I suggest you go touch grass and make some friends. It’s a lot easier than arguing against the facts.
sg_plumber@reddit
Rejoice! Amid lots of other things here are the answers you seek. :-)
sg_plumber@reddit
We can. It's being done. Also, do fertilizers produce GHGs?
Electrical trains would like a word with your sources.
True. But not without technology to sustain them.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Yes they do unfortunately. And in alarming quantities.
At front end. Haber Bosch produces alarming amounts of CO2, getting the methane produces large quantities of fugitive methane.
At the back end it chokes ecosystems and causes them to emit methane, and emits alarming quantities of NO and NO2.
The first is solvable with electrolysis (nitrogen electrolysis being my favourite over hydrogen). The second is a byproduct of poor application processes and too intensive farming.
sg_plumber@reddit
Ouch. I should have guessed that was the case.
Much room for improvement!
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Similarly for fertilizer. Hydrogen electrolysis is real and can make fertiliser with the same minerals as a haeber bosch setup and a lot of energy. If there is spare energy then ammonia is still on the table (although industrial agriculture is still extremely destructive).
As an alternative: We know biointensive methods work at least well enough for a vegan diet with much less land than an omnivore industrial diet..
You can bribe microbes to fix your nitrogen and still have high sustainable yields whilst also supporting biodiversity.
We also know it requires a very large amount of high skill, high knowledge labour and a long, slow runway. Attempting it without this leads to famine.
We know that energy can be traded for labour.
It is possible to imagine a world where cameras, computers, and electric motors are used to reduce the labour significantly. Allowing energy to be traded for food in a way other than hydrogen electrolysis.
This is not a complete solution, but it should be something degrowth discusses and examines.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
If you are asserting that the eroi of fossil fuels is presently infinite and the only waste-heat stream is when converting to electricity, then you're not making the eroi argument at all.
IronyDiedIn2016@reddit
We can meet targets with policy change. A simple one would be better business tax incentives for working from home.
Another change would be adding more rail routes for commercial shipping.
Most of my carbon emissions are involuntary. The government could be doing a lot more to help me reduce my emissions.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Absolutely.
Just making it legal to travel to the next town over outside a car would be a great start. As would not continuously mandating they get bigger.
Collapse_is_underway@reddit
People are trying sooo hard to make it look like we're heading toward a solarpunk or similar future, when it's obviously not the case; at best, it'll be a few cities and subhurb, until complex supply chains cannot create the panels or similar high-tech stuff needed to keep on replacing it.
We overshot our welcome on the only spaceship we have and everyday we keep on going with growth-based civilization is another day with more chemicals poured into Nature (and so, us as well) and making it more prone to being sterile.
I wish I could jerk myself off with "goodnews from renewables" while ignoring the rest, though.
AbominableGoMan@reddit
China, the number one producer of solar panels and batteries, is still building new thermal coal.
Meanwhile, even though wood is a shrinking percentage of the energy mix, we still burn more wood than at any previous time in history.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
They didn't burn all of the coal, all of the oil and all of the gas though. So this further supports the idea that, whatever the EROI of renewables + overnight battery is, it's much higher than 1 / (the fraction of the world's energy china uses).
I am also not disputing Jevon's paradox or overconsumption being bad. Please try to stay on topic.
AbominableGoMan@reddit
lol 'try to stay on topic'
Maybe it's been a while since you've done a science course. Whatever your hypothesis is, the observed reality of increasing fossil fuel usage is data that can't just be dismissed. It's not the data's fault.
Show me a 100% electrified supply chain for the production of PEV, vehicles and refineries included.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
That's not related to the topic though.
The eroi hypothesis would require at least as much energy to go into the economic activity of creating the renewables as they will release in their lifetime.
We can observe (using the same assumptions in the hypothesis) that the released energy is greater than the input.
AbominableGoMan@reddit
If solar panels were as great as they're cracked up to be, you'd see stories about Blackrock or fucking Zillow buying up massive tracts of the American sunbelt for pennies on the dollar. Why would shitbag capitalists overpay for energy if they could own solar panels.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Someone is doing this to the tune of about 32GW (eight Vogtle 3s) per year https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/91209.pdf. And growing by another twelve Vogtle 3s per year in queued projects.
As well as going out of the way to make sure small scale systems are taxed and regulated out the wazoo so individuals and small businesses can't compete. Single sided residential small commercial and panels getting a +100% tax just as feed in tarrifs ended that large utility double sided panels are exempt from, but utilities are still charging people 200-400% of the entire final installed price the developing world pays (and 150-200% of their final price including land) just for the privilege of a permission slip.
You'll note all the big oil producing areas like texas or saudi arabia or the north sea are going hard into wind and solar too. They need to to get their tarry garbage out of the ground without burning it all.
unnamedpeaks@reddit
I'm not getting your point. Renewables have a positive eroi? Yes. That's true. So what.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
It's still widely presented as being false. Including repeatedly in this thread.
unnamedpeaks@reddit
I don't know if they do or don't. I'm not numerate enough to evaluate micheaux data. He has a peer reviewed paper coming out soon. Can you zoom out, take a breath, and tell us what your agenda is? Like, if you are right, and they have a positive eroi, so what? What difference does that make? They can't possibly have the same eroi as fossil fuels, and even if they did, then what?
I think last everyone on this sub would agree that if we were all working rapidly towards degrowtjnans sustainability, solar and wind could play an important role. But that isn't going to happen.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
The end conclusion is the solar-punk style society is not excluded from an energy standpoint, and that peak civilisational power is a controllable choice.
It makes deliberately making that choice important because it is no longer involuntary.
And it radically changes the resources available for adapting to or mitigating the harms of overshoot.
The first bit is the most important to me, because very few people outside degrowth communities think about it at all.
The second bit is important, because despair is a weapon actively being wielded to maintain fossil fuel consumption.
Why not? Shale oil or tar sands are absolutely terrible from an energy standpoint -- exergy out on energy in around 2. Oil producing nations have extremely high per capita energy consumption and extremely low standard of living. There are only so many lambourghinis and private jets an oligarch can use, a lot of that energy is being used for oil production, refining and transport.
And why does it even matter if it's "not as high". Whatever the number is, it is "low enough that a civilisation can produce an entire extra energy system and still run itself and also not notice it just did that".
If that is true then suddenly removing CO2 at the rate we currently emit (after stopping new emissions) it is no longer forbidden from an energy perspective. Maybe forbidden from a cost or motivation or labour one, but it immediately becomes possible to try.
Trading energy for labour in a biointensive organic farming setup also becomes possible.
Using energy to mitigate water scarcity is on the table.
Remediating depleted soils.
unnamedpeaks@reddit
Because we can't make them without fossil fuels and we have to mine fossil fuels+ all the other elements that go into renewables.
You're manic if you think solar panels and batteries are part of a steampunk future.
You're insane if you think humans will volunteer to have less cheap exogenous energy.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Why? Which step is categorically impossible? If some step is radically less efficient, which one? Why? Turning electricity and CO2 back into hydrocarbons can be done at an energy loss. How much is unavoidable? Why is the quantity too much to derive from waste biomass? How do you know it's too much?
This is not what the solarpunk ethos is at all. The core concept is eliminating as much growth/consumption/centralisation/industrialisation as possible whilst keeping any that is unavoidable. A big factory producing durable, repairable, recyclable high tech goods that significantly reduce land impact or increase quality of life is consistent with the ideology. It may not be achievable, but it's not logically inconsistent.
If we accept that is true then renewables being energy positive is a very bad thing. Because it's more, cheaper, more exogenous energy. Either the humans need to make a collective choice or it will result in a delayed version of the same thing later. It still matters in this case.
I would also assert that that's a very cynical take and doesn't have predictive power over those (minority) regions where energy use is decreasing while gdp goes up and quality of life is relatively stagnant. People can and do chose to not have cars, or insulate over heating or live in a smaller than the largest-available house or buy recyclable and durable goods. Mostly only the people who live extremely comfortably already, but an "exists" is sufficient to disprove a "for all". Many countries have already collectively volunteered to increase the cost of energy and reduce the quantity -- all of the early adopters of renewables when they had negative EROI did this, all countries with energy efficiency targets and carbon prices are doing this. It is not sufficient to solve the problem, but it disproves your assertion as an absolute.
unnamedpeaks@reddit
People have carefully explained this and you aren't hearing it. You think we can smelt minerals without fossil fuel?? What about all the plastic (fossil fuels) needed for the parts themselves. You're suggesting we mine and manufacturer solar panels with electricity? You're not in biophysical reality, and are fixated on your eroi straw man.
If you want to carefully take apart micheaux I'd like to see it
sg_plumber@reddit
most new steelmaking is now electric
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
This is hopeful, but not a complete picture. Arc furnaces use recycled or DRI iron as feedstock.
The DRI still needs to be reduced somehow. The reducing agent is usually some combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen from fossil sources.
Hydrogen from electrolysis for this purpose is not in scope for my system-wide argument as this is a case where it takes 3-4 joules of electricity to replace 1 joule of coal.
The method boston metals uses would be in scope as it is much more efficient, but they have not proven themselves commercially yet.
Similarly a CO2->CO electrolyser would also be in scope as this process is much more efficient, but I am also not aware of commercialisation.
sg_plumber@reddit
Much work still to do, true, but not impossible. P-}
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
The plastic in solar panels is ethylene. It's pretty trivial to make from any hydrocarbon and energy.
The biggest mining equipment is all electric (some of it is diesel electric). Batteries and pantographs in the more mobile equipment are becoming common for cost reasons.
Silver and copper ore are processed with hydrochloric or sulfuric acid and electric motors. The sulfur cycle just requires heat, hydrochloric acid happens if you electrolyse salt water (and get another metal - sodium).
Smelting is just heat and reduction. Resistors or induction coils make heat just fine. Many metals are reduced using electricity already (magnesium and aluminium are examples. Reducing iron with electricity takes much less energy than doing it chemically (it is presently slightly more expensive because coal is very cheap compared to oil). Reducing H2O or CO2 for use in a shaft furnace is also just a matter of energy.
beanscornandrice@reddit
With a warming climate, more natural disasters will occur in more regions . Nowhere is or will be safe, so what happens to those numbers when a tornado takes down a wind/solar farm, or a whole regions power storage? We rebuild, and then it happens again next year, a few miles in another direction. What happens when a port gets shut down due to a strike after a disaster, or a single sourced component's factory gets damaged in a flood, or a wildfire takes out an entire regions grid and infrastructure?
It all sounds good on paper, your thoughts and analysis, but we don't live in that theoretical world, we live in a warming climate, and these scenarios I listed will become more frequent, more powerful, and it will take longer and longer to rebuild and recover until we can no longer rebuild and recover before the next, or compounding disaster strikes.
Jarvons Paradox aside, u/PlasticTheory6 has a great point. Infinite growth from a finite source has consequences.
sg_plumber@reddit
One would think having a distributed energy grid in those scenarios would be better than a centralized system where a single cable or a big powerplant failing can send whole cities into darkness.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Please be clear that I am not defending growth or pretending climate change won't cause massive problems. These things are independent of what type of infrastructure you have.
I am asking why people are still making the version of the EROI argument that is energy in/energy out.
/u/theyareallgone had a productive on topic expansion of the idea to a related argument. I don't think it is sufficient to say fossil fuels are the top of the energy ladder on its own, but it provides interesting discussion.
The_Sex_Pistils@reddit
Whatever happened to flywheel energy storage?
sg_plumber@reddit
It's seeing renewed interest, but it has to compete with bigger/easier/cheaper alternatives, like e-fuels, pumped hydro, iron-air batteries, etc.
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
It's in the shed with the perpetual motion machine.
The_Sex_Pistils@reddit
Damn. Oh well.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
It's not very good? Much like lifting concrete blocks or piping hydrogen around.
theyareallgone@reddit
Storage.
Fossil fuels have their storage costs already baked into their EROI, but solar and wind need to have storage added on. The EROI for batteries is terrible and makes any combined solar/wind+battery EROI terrible.
Non-dispatchable (eg. no storage) energy sources aren't nearly as useful because they are unreliable, inconsistent, and often unavailable (eg. at night or when it's cloudy). Without storage you can't have EV cars. Without storage many areas would have no lights at night or heating in winter. Without storage you can't rely on being able to harvest the fields during that short window. Without storage you can't efficiently run industrial production because startup procedures often take hours and would need to be done every day or two.
Without storage you can't make coffee before going to work most of the year in most of the world.
Further, you often need to transfer the energy between multiple storage units. For example from the grid battery into your EV truck battery into your tool battery. Stacking batteries like this makes makes an already poor EROI worse. The EROI of a metal tank is much much better and very little energy is lost when you pour fuel from one tank into another.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
This is not the argument as usually provided, I was asking why we are constantly seeing the one based on the energy of the generator alone or claims about material flows.
But that aside, this is also in the same year that 12-15 hours of battery storage was produced for every net watt. With a similar complete lack of fanfare or any indication of reaching mining limits. It lasts about half as long, so sans recycling that's about 6-8 hours. This is excluding the 8-24 hours of pumped storage for every fifth watt also baked in and excluding that about 10% of energy is already renewable dispatch.
More than enough for all the uses you cited already baked in. Without a solution for dunkelflaute there will be some disruption where energy gies down to 20% of the average for a couple of weeks a year in some climates, and we may have to return to past methods for overnight or over-week heat storage like big piles of bricks, but that hardly seems civilisation ending.
In pure economic terms considering only the EROI ( and ignoring climate change for now), we can also just have a fossil fuel backup.
We know our wind + solar can meet about 70% of a steady load because it happens in many places in multiple different climates, and so our fossil fuels go at least 3x further. Much further (around 100x) if we use some of the batteries or other storage methods.
Between these I'm not really seeing any civilisation-ending mismatch. Inconvenience, yes. Reasons to move to a slower paced less consuming society, also yes. But the eroi argument is a very very long bow to draw here. The effect of producing the virgin renewables at the rate needed for steady state had so little effect that there must be very great deal of slack in the system.
theyareallgone@reddit
Your base statistics are misleading or about the wrong things. From there it is unavoidable to come to incorrect conclusions.
Firstly, you can't compare the cumulative 30 year production of renewables against current consumption. Electricity generated next year does you no good this year. On a rolling basis you are constantly replacing worn out installations so it makes no sense to consider the big bang installation. So you need to talk about (as a maximum granularity) per-year production. In many situations per-season production/consumption numbers are more edifying.
Secondly, 'net watt' isn't a useful metric. We don't care what percentage of the percentage of growth in energy could be stored in the batteries manufactured last year. We care about how many days of energy use we can time shift from high production/low consumption periods to low production/high consumption periods.
Using the most easily accessible estimate, the world produces a little over a little over 172 PWh / year. Now this is primary energy and there is a discussion to be had about the conversion factor to get final energy, but I would be quite surprised if this where less than 0.5. Heating (a big industrial and building use) and direct electrical generation is 100%, combined gas plants are around 60%, mediocre coal plants around 40%, industrial diesel engines around 40%, and transportation engines (including heating loads) probably average around 30%.
So perhaps the world uses as little as 86 PWh/y, or 86000 TWh/y. Or 236 TWh/day. How many TWh of batteries are being manufactured per year?
Though I question your conversion from nameplate capacity to annual generation, if I accept that ~1300TWh/y of actual production is being installed each year and compare the total final energy of 86000 TWh/y. So to replace the existing production base requires 66 times the per year install rate. But renewable installations don't last 66 years. They often only last 20-25 years.
In both cases the material needs of the end product manufacturing needs to increase by several factors just to reach a sustaining volume, let alone one which could replace fossil fuel infrastructure on an accelerated schedule and manage the growth in energy use in the intervening time. Since global growth goes pretty much as fast as it can, this growth of renewable manufacturing must come from the share of some other industry.
Thirdly, when people talk seriously about an economy based on renewables they also consider all the mining and manufacturing also being done using only renewables. This is part of why battery storage is such a big concern. Mining equipment needs massive amounts of energy and needs it 24 hours a day to be economic or issues like financing and rust eats your lunch. A big mining truck will consume 8400 litres a day, or about 33600 KWh final energy. That means at least 4 hours of battery (4200 KWh) on the truck itself, plus probably two or three days of time-shift battery power (100800 KWh) for a total battery need for just that one truck of 105000 KWh. To produce the electricity to run that truck, assuming a 20% capacity factor and 50% recovery surplus (to make up for low generation days) is around 252000 KWh nameplate capacity of solar panels. That's a lot of extra material which isn't needed for a diesel powered truck. When you work the arithmetic sequence for mining the additional material needed to mine the materials to build the solar panels and batteries for the, say, iron ore mining truck backwards the numbers are grim.
For as long as renewables are manufactured with fossil fuels the numbers don't look so bad. When they need to stand alone the material needs become problematic.
Especially when you again consider that renewable manufacturing must come at the expense of some already existing industry.
This is even true when you look at simple electricity generation today! Solar power looks cheap when it's using a natural gas plant as its 'battery'; especially when that plant is owned by somebody else so the worsened efficiency and utilization factors aren't counted against the solar panels themselves.
Finally, a civilization can exist solely on renewables -- we have many historical examples -- but our civilization cannot. It's not clear precisely what we'd need to lose to change to such a civilization, but it is not nothing. Always-on or predictable energy is critical to many technologies which forms the base for everything else. The Internet cannot exist without it. Intensive care in hospitals cannot exist without it. Industrial farming cannot exist without it. Aluminum manufacturing requires it. Fast computer chips cannot be produced without it. A major challenge in developing regions without reliable electricity is keeping vaccines cold enough so they don't spoil -- image a world where every region had that problem.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
If you are asserting that the eroi of fossil fuels is presently infinite and the only waste-heat stream is when converting to electricity, then you're not making the eroi argument at all, you're asserting the opposite.
So how then does this justify it?
theyareallgone@reddit
Where was I asserting that the EROI of fossil fuels is infinite? That most certainly isn't the case. I'm simply pointing out that no matter what the EROI of fossil fuels, the EROI of renewables is some substantial factor worse, if only (but not exclusively) due to the matter weight of storage. Storage which cannot be avoided if you want the same types of technologies and civilization we have today.
The data I've seen suggests that the Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE) (approximately but not exactly the reciprocal of EROI) for fossil fuels was around 5% in the 2000's. That same source predicts that the ECoE for wind and solar will have decreased to about 13% this year.
Using those two estimates, solar+wind supplies 5/13 or ~38.5% of the energy per unit of energy invested. It's easy to compute the sum of the infinite arithmetic series: 1/(1/0.385) = ~1.623. This says that on purely energy terms, ignoring functionally important properties like dispatchability or portability, to support the same final energy would require 1.623 times as much renewable production infrastructure as there currently exists fossil fuel infrastructure.
But this is a best-case because today we pretty much don't do storage for renewables at all. That 13% number is as a fossil fuel supplement, not replacement. So to get a realistic number you need to first factor in the cost of storage; with about 3% energy losses every time power goes into or out of a battery and batteries weighing so much, this makes the ECoE for renewables standing alone substantially worse .
In short:
Storage.
sg_plumber@reddit
Global average solar LCOE stood at $0.044/kWh in 2023, says IRENA
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Heat is not work, and a bottom up estimate with poorly defined boundaries does not refute drawing the barrier around the entire civilisation.
1kWh of elwctricity moves a car 5-6x as far as 1kWh of heat from oil.
1kWh of electricity cooks 3-5x as much food as 1kWh of gas
1kWh of electricity heats 3-10x as much space as 1kWh of gas
So you either transport, process, build a generator and burn your fossil fuel for electricity (each step taking energy) or burn it at the end use very inefficiently.
In either case the 4-5TWy of electricity with 6-8h storage (12-16h for each average watt added, but with lower lifetime) included replaces 8-20TWh of fossil fuels and was produced without disrupting the economy that produced it. The majority (about 70%) came from china (about a third of fossil fuels) and did not disrupt that economy. Continuing the same investment (whatever it happened to be) ends in producing 5TWy each year and replacing worn equipment.
Whatever ECoE you find, and whatever the economic threshold is, it has been surpassed by virtue of it being surpassed without disrupting the economy. If your micro-scale analysis disagrees with it, then it is wrong.
If your arugment is that there is some use to which electricity with 6 hours storage categorically cannot be efficiently applied, that is a different argument. Civilisation doesn't end if everyone stays home and reads a book for the one or two weeks a year a small subset of countries produce a third of their average VRE while the 30% power tends essential services.
It might suck, maybe long distance flights or bulk shipping on routes that don't stop for 2000km can only happen with scarce scraps of waste-derive biofuel. These things are not civilisation ending.
unnamedpeaks@reddit
Dude, I'm not following your logic. You clearly didn't hear his points. You're not touching grass. You're "eroi hypothesis" is a straw man. Everyone is explaining to you why your thesis is flawed and you keep attacking your straw man. Nobody cares about whatever you mean by "the eroi hypothesis" and is explaining to you the biophysical reality of the situation. Stop looking at the map and read the terrain.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
All of the "peak civilisational power" and similar arguments require it as a base. It is not a straw man if it is one of the foundational pillars of the peak fossil fuel supply idea. Every degrowth author and website makes some variant of the argument.
You could replace it with a different hypothesis (some suggestions have been made here, such as electricity being a fundamentally unsuitable replacement for chemical energy), but you cannot just ignore it.
sg_plumber@reddit
What are yours?
mushroomsarefriends@reddit
Yup. The EROI looks great for solar and wind, until you find yourself having to store it.
The problem is that once you reach that point, where most of the time solar and wind can supply your electricity needs, you've already begun bankrupting your non-intermittent baseload sources of electricity.
How do you keep a coal plant that's only needed 10% of the time affordable? And if you think that's costly, imagine a nuclear power plant that's not needed 90% of the time.
So we're going to try to store it eventually. And that's when we discover that storing electricity is expensive and difficult.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Gas generators already operate in exactly this fashion, and the world also produced enough batteries for ~8 hours storage for all the renewable energy this year.
And is a shortfall of 50-80% for 10-20% of the time civilisation ending in a world that invented sensible heat storage, firewood and water towers many centuries ago, or merely inconvenient, unpleasant and bad for profits?
mushroomsarefriends@reddit
That depends on where it hits. There will be island communities that are used to hurricanes that can deal with it.
But here in the Netherlands, where I live, it would be utterly catastrophic. There are period in winter of three or four consecutive days without wind and sun. You would have people trapped in elevators, bridges stuck open, electric vehicles that can't be charged, trains and metros that stop riding. And most importantly, most people live beneath sea level and the water is pumped away with pumps that run on electricity. Same for the tunnels that run under the rivers. People would just have their homes flood after a while.
And then there's the simple fact that refrigerators stop working and people become unable to cook their food.
But most importantly perhaps, almost all payments are now done digitally, many people don't have physical cash and many stores don't even have a way of accepting it.
sg_plumber@reddit
You know the Netherlands has good electrical interconnects with all its neighbours, right?
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
That sounds more along the lines of extremely unpleasant and requiring behavior change.
Especially accounting for the storage (allowing a warning) and that the "no wind" periods still produce about 10% of the energy.
It leaves solutions on the table like shivering in the dark as your sensible heat slowly runs down for four days and the 10% power is directed to the pumps and hospitals, or moving people to areas where dunkelflaute coincides less with very bad weather.
None of this is good, but it seems like it is preferable to no energy at all during winter and doesn't self-evidently destroy complex supply chains.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
sounds like we need to distinguish critical and non critical electricity and adapt to accepting not having guaranteed access to non critical electricity.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Yes. Exactly! This is the point I'm trying to get across.
If the renewable EROI is positive and the material flows for raw energy output are manageable, then we need to consider what a civilisation that tries to maintain them has to give up.
Maybe making a quarter as much junk will allow everyone to go home from work during the dunkelflaute to their barely-warm house heated by sensible heat andit by a single 1W LED while the hospital runs at 50% power. This sucks a lot, but it sucks way less than no heating at all and no ability to manufacture anything.
sg_plumber@reddit
Already happening.
Bandits101@reddit
Windmills and solar panels have a life span. They are all manufactured, established and maintained with FF’s. They are a FF use extender and an attempt to continue BAU, by hoodwinking people like you into thinking that they are good for the environment and a solution to energy problems.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
So you are arguing that they exchange a smaller amount of economically useful fossil fuel energy for a larger amount of economically useful electricity, but the process can't be closed loop because one of the steps cannot be performed with electricity?
Interesting.
Which steps and how much energy do they use?
Bandits101@reddit
No idea what you are talking about..steps and energy use. You quantify “small”, “economically useful”, “larger”, “efficiently”. I’m guessing you’re a teenager that thinks they’ve invented a new truth.
mistyflame94@reddit
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West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Here. If the exergy return on invested is significantly positive, it is a useful tool. You argue that it is not useful and dependent on fossil fuels. My question is which fossil fuels and which stage of the lifecycle cannot be replaced with electricity?
Note I am not defending BAU, merely questioning one of the core assumption that energy use for whatever solution cannot come from renewable sources.
Bandits101@reddit
The world has been adding so called “renewables” and now electric vehicles in earnest for over twenty and guess what, all the while FF production and use steadily increased, even setting records.
“Renewables” are/were never ever, ever intended to get us off FF or save the planet. They are solely for extending BAU, what you naively declare that you are NOT DEFENDING.
Population continue to rise, species extinctions, deforestation, overfishing, soil degradation, air pollution and ocean acidification continue on their merry way and you want to add more renewables, because you say the EROI is worth it.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
I am attempting to discuss whether they are a usable tool for departing from BAU.
It is self evident that BAU is bad.
It is also self evident that immediate adoption of primativism cannot help without immediate mass depopulation. Pre-fossil-fuel societies required much more ecosystem per calita to maintain their civilisations than we have left.
So the outcomes are mass-execution, overshoot and mass death, or find an energy source to maintain the standard of living seen in the third world without overshoot.
Renewables have been frequently dismissed as an option for the third via thermodynamic and mineral flow arguments.
If we can see those arguments are invalid, inapplicable to a degrowth society, or wrong by several orders of magnitude then there is the possibility of an action to take other than giving up and ignoring the problem, immediately dying, or immediately killing ten people. Regardless of the intent behind their creation, they are a tool that exists and can be repurposed.
Bandits101@reddit
You are untrue to yourself. You SAY you are not advocating BAU but that is EXACTLY what you are doing. There is no “departing” from BAU by adding a different BAU, like BAU lite.
We cannot engineer our way out of a predicament we engineered ourselves into. “Departing BAU” will be done without our permission. Look around you at the plastic, rubber and asphalt.
Look at the ferilizers, chemicals, concrete, wood products, weapons, health products, air industry, billions of motor vehicles and so on and so on. You think windmills will get us off BAU, you’re mad.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
Then you are arguing for "do nothing and die".
Why put effort into stopping people trying then? Even if it is folly they aren't changing the outcome.
Bandits101@reddit
We are doing everything and we are still “going to die”. You’re all talk. Most likely the clothes you’re wearing are plastic. Did you know the giant blades on those windmills of yours are mostly plastic.
We’re on a runaway train gathering speed and putting your foot on a wheel to apply brakes is just stupid. You are still in the bargaining stage.
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West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
You didn't answer me. Why actively oppose it?
Bandits101@reddit
“Actively oppose IT”, I never mentioned it and I’ve no stake one way or another, I’m a realist. DO NOT put words in my mouth to further your personal agenda. I’ve had enough of going in circles and your cornucopian silliness.
Bandits101@reddit
Do know “renewables” are parasitic on the vast power grids that were/are built and maintained with FF’s. Have you factored in maintenance and decommissioning.
Those giant windmills require just as much finance to decommission as construction and because of that, they end up being felled and left to pollute the landscape.
End of life and upgraded solar panels now are being left on site or dumped. These things are the stone heads of desperation to preserve BAU.
West-Abalone-171@reddit (OP)
How do we define parasitic? Those grids are being expanded and maintained from the same pool of energy.
Decomissioning is a valid point. I would posit that in a non-BAU world, the main input in the decomissioning phase is labour, and that the labour input for recycling is small enough to be sustainable. It is self-evidently less price efficient in the west than virgin materials, but not self evidently less labour efficient. The labour providing the virgin materials is paid very poorly, and the labour for collection and recycling is paid 10x as much. Neither of these are a direct proxy for energy input, but there is no indication recycling at EOL requires more energy or mineral flow than virgin mining.
A thought experiment for a non-BAU renewable powered world:
If we consider the mean human (better than the median because of the wealthy using disproportionate shares) has access to about 2kW of heat, and that for purposes such as personal transport, space heating and cooking it is fairly trivial to substitute 1W of electricity and 1 hour of storage for 3W of heat, then our mean human needs about 700W of electricity.
This is about eight 500W solar panels and a 5kg LFP battery replaced twice as often as the PV.
If our mean human, at some point in 30 years spends a few days with a pair of latex gloves, a a razor, pliers and a fume hood, they can separate the 2kg of high value minerals from the 10kg of batteries, 2kg charge controller and 80kg of solar panels into 5kg of goop that is more concentrated and easier to process than the virgin ores they came from as well as separate the aluminium and silicon.
Then they need the machine/system that built them to do it again. If we value their labour at $2/hr then they need to trade about 6 months to a year for this service (which includes paying for the energy source for subsequent steps).
This is much much more labour than a wealthy westerner would exchange for the electricity, but it is a very small proportion of economic output and far less labour than chopping, moving, and stacking 150 tonnes of firewood.
Platypus-Dick-6969@reddit
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