Bravo on pointing out growth is dependent on energy -- we don't care about our exponentially growing economic debt because it doesn't matter as long as The Economy is growing exponentially, but if growth is tied to energy, that means we need to be exponentially growing our energy supply too.
Awesome job bringing in EROI. We can keep exponentially growing our energy supply as long as we have infinite reserves of high-return energy supplies.
Let's take a look at oil from your link:
> The weighted average standard EROI of all oil liquids (including coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, biofuels, etc.) is expected to decrease from 44.4 in 1950 to a plateau of 6.7 in 2050
Huh, in EROI-speak, that means we're expending more effort to get fewer returns out, which is a fancy way of saying "Oil's getting tapped out"
Shale revolution?
> Resulting EROI is typically around 1.4-1.5
Anything above 1.0 is worth doing, but the Revolution sounds like bottom-of-the-barrel marginal returns.
So how about your incendiary renewables-massive-leap-backwards comment?
PV had admittedly a "depends on how you measure things" high error bars:
> mean harmonized EROIs between 8.7 and 34.2
Wind is quoted as 19.8 with front-of-the-technology-curve numbers quoted as high as 31. The nuance here is whereas oil has finite reserves and can only decrease long-term, manufacturing-based technologies will increase up the learning curve before they plateau.
So, finally we have nuclear: quoted as EROI 75-106. Clearly a winner on energy-return, but EROI doesn't capture the messy pragmatics. Instead of energy-return, we can look at cost-returns: Levelized Cost of Energy, or how much lifetime energy do you get out vs. the lifetime costs of that energy. And we all know how expensive nuclear plants are to design, build, and maintain. There have been nuclear plants shuttered because in the 10 years it would take to get them online, you could just overbuild solar way more cheaply. Big advantage of renewals is they're getting dirt-cheap (relatively speaking).
And I'm not even touching the politics of nuclear risk and waste yet... yes, there's solutions, but I would argue that's still a much hairier problem than renewables' intermittency.
Point is, yes, from a "exponentially-growing civilization requires exponentially-growing energy" point of view, nuclear is the only path forward. But cost-returns are just as important as energy-returns -- both can make a project infeasible, and if you consider both constraints, renewals aren't a bad solution.
Awesome job bringing in EROI. We can keep exponentially growing our energy supply as long as we have infinite reserves of high-return energy supplies.
Let's take a look at oil from your link:
> The weighted average standard EROI of all oil liquids (including coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, biofuels, etc.) is expected to decrease from 44.4 in 1950 to a plateau of 6.7 in 2050
Huh, in EROI-speak, that means we're expending more effort to get fewer returns out, which is a fancy way of saying "Oil's getting tapped out"
Shale revolution?
> Resulting EROI is typically around 1.4-1.5
Anything above 1.0 is worth doing, but the Revolution sounds like bottom-of-the-barrel marginal returns.
So how about your incendiary renewables-massive-leap-backwards comment?
PV had admittedly a "depends on how you measure things" high error bars:
> mean harmonized EROIs between 8.7 and 34.2
Wind is quoted as 19.8 with front-of-the-technology-curve numbers quoted as high as 31. The nuance here is whereas oil has finite reserves and can only decrease long-term, manufacturing-based technologies will increase up the learning curve before they plateau.
So, finally we have nuclear: quoted as EROI 75-106. Clearly a winner on energy-return, but EROI doesn't capture the messy pragmatics. Instead of energy-return, we can look at cost-returns: Levelized Cost of Energy, or how much lifetime energy do you get out vs. the lifetime costs of that energy. And we all know how expensive nuclear plants are to design, build, and maintain. There have been nuclear plants shuttered because in the 10 years it would take to get them online, you could just overbuild solar way more cheaply. Big advantage of renewals is they're getting dirt-cheap (relatively speaking).
And I'm not even touching the politics of nuclear risk and waste yet... yes, there's solutions, but I would argue that's still a much hairier problem than renewables' intermittency.
Point is, yes, from a "exponentially-growing civilization requires exponentially-growing energy" point of view, nuclear is the only path forward. But cost-returns are just as important as energy-returns -- both can make a project infeasible, and if you consider both constraints, renewals aren't a bad solution.