Wind power and solar photovoltaics have higher energy returns than fossil fuels
nature.com
nature.com
It took until 1982 but eventually it looked like alternatives to fossil fuel were going to be here to stay.
There wasn't very wide recognition of climate upset, which even now is treated as more of a future boogeyman.
The research was a "little" more urgent since the ongoing financial devastation from having all those dollars diverted to places like Saudi Arabia was continuing to undercut the momentum of nationwide prosperity completely. In real time.
Then one day the price of oil dropped precipitously enough to cause a world-wide "oil recession". Too bad for the oilmen. The rest of the world could breathe a sigh of relief. After years of inflation it was the only thing that ever came down in price, but it was a major one for people across the board. Dead cat bounced for about 5 years but alternative energy was still kicking. Then oil bottomed sufficiently to insure another 20 years bad luck for the oil business. But to them it was completely worth it because it put a stake in the heart of solar and wind.
Higher energy returns is in terms of investment dollars. There will always be a price for crude oil below which wind and solar have lower returns. Just like it was before.
The question is, can OPEC actually reduce the price below that point any more, and sustain it for the amount of time necessary to halt alternative momentum this time?
Seems to me some OPEC types have badly mortgaged their oil dollars to a greater extent than the original sheikhs used to do, so there may not be that much dry powder any more.
The recent agreement to cut back production specifically to drive prices up may be for immediate financial reasons. OTOH once immediate relief has occurred, maybe the floor will be dropped and those who borrowed for alternative purposes will be held underwater long enough to where they can't breathe any more either.
And the really fun part about it, is that we won't even have money to mitigate the effects of climate change, because we literally chased windmills instead of being realistic and pragmatic and investing on sound and proven technologies like nuclear instead of throwing money at intermittent sources that made energy absurdly more expensive in places like Germany, UK and South Australia, all the while dreaming that batteries will be enough to save us.
Of course, the wall street folks and the usual hustlers behind this, they will have already relocated to greener pastures leaving us to pay the bill.
> Mark my words [..] brought us to third-world style poverty, while frantically learning mandarim to have a chance to migrate to China
a) What's your reliable source of information that trumps all other institutions that say the opposite?; And
b) what makes them more reliable, says you?
If you're going to make sensational claims, you better have exceptional evidence to back yourself. Otherwise you're just making noise.
> Germany
Should never have shut down their nuclear, sure.
> South Australia
There was like, the one incident, which people like to point at and go 'See! It doesn't work!', when actually it was because transmission lines fell over.
Here's the latest quarterly report of the wholesale market for Australia, by state (note figure 1):
https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/2024-04/Q1%202024%20Whol...
> sound and proven technologies like nuclear
The lead time for this is 15 years. It's the only energy generation technology that has become less economical with time, precisely because it isn't 'sound' without strict oversight. Gas peakers are the more timely and economical option.
> the wall street folks and the usual hustlers behind this
The wall street folks won't put their money behind something that won't see returns, but yet that's exactly what they've been doing, and continue to do. China and India (and the rest of the global south) are building their own renewable capacity at absurd scale, not because of wall street shills, but because it's the most economical way to generate power.
For more than 20 years Americans have been coping with results of the Nixon and Reagan policies, and their ilk, which effectively brought all Americans except the most well-heeled to a level of third-world poverty, relative to the prosperity that was bound to unfold otherwise.
Remember what it was like when Nixon resigned in disgrace, and instantly you could never find someone who ever admitted to voting for him a second time? Not just for years, but for the rest of his life. And he was re-elected. That's how disgraceful it was to the overwhelming millions of voting World War II veterans and people who vote like them, to have such a dishonest person get elected as president. Disregard the lessons taught by WWII veterans at your peril.
If only more Americans could have retained that degree of righteousness, and it could have blossomed instead of withered.
Anyway at the time WWII veterans were still a major voting force but nobody would even talk about Nixon any more. Everybody knew he was complete selfish scum by then and nobody tried to deny it. But these are patriotic Americans who were not going to lose respect for the office of the President. After a number of years and a couple other presidents, eventually people could finally come up with one thing Nixon did that was not considered the act of a crooked politician. What did Nixon do that was good so he wouldn't have to go down in history as a complete failure? "Nixon opened up China." "Nixon opened up China." That's all anybody said when the subject came up, which was quite rarely. That presidency was so compromised that all energy was focused on leaving it behind.
Like everyone else it seemed like it was not too bad to explore relations with China at the time. At least it didn't seem completely evil. A little freedom of communication and trade with China might be OK. What could go wrong? With people like Reagan around no communists were going to get a leg up, so there should be nothing to fear.
In hindsight we were dummies. If Nixon could have been kept from going to China, the US would be 20 years ahead by now.
At least Nixon wasn't a whining loser like he could have been, and wasn't so low-class he didn't know enough to leave graciously when hundreds of millions of Americas didn't want him around any more. Since it was so embarrassing already anyway.
>wall street folks and the usual hustlers behind this, they will have already relocated to greener pastures leaving us to pay the bill.
Now that already happened way before the 1970's.
not my downvote btw
Government agency graphic design sensibilities, and the EPA.
But the list doesn't get much longer than that.
If only a news organization wasn't created with the express intention of bringing that about.
TLDR: we have nuclear fuel for 200 years at current rate of consumption.
If we replace everything with nuclear or we build small less efficient nuclear plants, it will last maybe 50 years. What then?
The fact that now renewables seem to be honest-to-goodness competitive is big news. If serious people should be investing in renewables which is a huge change in the economic equilibrium.
Lazy laggards are receiving the benefits of those investments previously made.
https://energytransition.org/2016/01/how-germany-helped-brin...
> “The Germans were not really buying power — they were buying a price decline,” Hal Harvey, a US clean energy expert.
But regardless; if we don't have any argument that Germany spent a lot of money on wind/solar and weren't getting power out of it then I think serious people would dispute that wind/solar had higher energy returns than coal at the time. It is pretty obvious that coal/oil/gas had better returns. But it has been a busy decade and it is much more plausible now that renewables are competitive. The explosive growth certainly suggests they are.
Also the LCOE:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
They haven't put out a report for this year, but it appears they didn't for 2022 either.
The transition away from oil will take a long, long time, and natural gas will be an essential component in renewable strategies for some time to come. But Europe needs to figure out how to reduce that consumption to not much more than what can be provided domestically and via trade with the US for geopolitical reasons.
Any cost comparison that doesn't factor in geopolitical concerns is incomplete.
This is why I think it's important when stating that renewables have a higher EROI than fossil fuels, to also emphasise that EROI is a stupid metric that doesn't matter at all in reality.
It was only ever popular with doomers and cranks for this reason.
...but China started manufacturing solar panels in no small part because Germany started buying them, promoting a virtuous cycle. It might have been a long wait for that cycle to begin of its own accord!
I think you've gone off script.
You're not supposed to state that you think burning dirty coal and imported Russian gas are better than renewables.
Normally people bashing Germany hide behind pretending they're nuclear fans.
This is because the harder to get fossil fuels are being burned in more efficient engines, resulting in more useful work being done for a given energy input to extract them.