How much would renewable cost if it wasn't supported by fossil fuel (e.g. for extracting and processing the resources needed to build solar panel)?
I find your comment pointless, given that in a not so distant past the bulk of energy was produced from fossil fuel.
Thankfully, the world is transitioning away from that, and at a considerable speed. We went from propaganda selling the lie that renewables were a passing fad to a point in time where entire countries register days where all their energy needs come from renewables and even overproduce energy, leading to negative energy costs.
I think you mean electric needs. That it's around 30% of the needs of the average country. It's important to be very clear about those distinctions. I think, in this issue, overselling is so dangerous as underselling.
Motor vehicle use, gas heating, air travel, intensive agriculture these are surely things that will vary a lot from one country to another, yet they use large amounts of non-electrical energy.
80% of energy used is in the world is from fossil fuel, and fossil fuel usage is still growing.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/global-fossil-f...
Renewable are cheap when you have a coal/nuclear plant nearby for the days without wind or sun, and because solar panels are built in China. It's wrong to think that they could replace fossil fuel and still be cheap.
That's a clear example of lying with statistics, given that only a very limited number of countries in the world started investing in shifting away from fossil fuels.
It took the EU a massive politically-driven subsidies program to jump-start their own shift to renewables, and currently we're seeing European countries meeting all their country's needs for a few days with their own wind, solar, and hydro.
Pollution and wars sure are worth it!
> In this article I will show that ERoEI is unimportant by itself. It usually does not matter if ERoEI is increasing or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any guidance about how much net energy will be available to us in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure, unless it is lower than 1, which it almost never is. Although different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important.
> What is important to civilization (and to us) is the amount of net energy obtained from a source of energy. It is an amount of net energy (not a high ERoEI) which allows us to drive cars, fly airplanes, and so on. If we obtain 1 GWh of NET energy, then it does not matter if it came from a high-ERoEI source, or from a low one. What matters is the amount of net energy.
> In turn, the amount of net energy depends upon two things: ERoEI AND the amount of gross energy. BOTH of those figures are required to determine the amount of net energy obtained. ERoEI by itself tells us almost nothing.
> Let me provide an example, to demonstrate this point. Suppose you have a solar PV panel with an ERoEI of 3, which returns 1KW on average continuously for 30 years. In that case, the net energy provided by that solar panel is 175.2 MWh ((12436530)(1-1/3)) over its lifetime. If, however you have ten such solar panels, then the net energy returned is ten times higher (1752 MWh), despite no change in ERoEI.