That looks pretty bad, but reality is even worse: most of the manufactured goods (including solar panels and windmills) in Europe and the US come from China, where the energy mix is even more weighted towards fossil fuels than in the US or EU. In other words, US and EU “outsource” their carbon pollution to developing nations where manufacturing and resource extraction is done.
The US and EU are just as dependent on the coal burned in China to produce goods for western consumption as they are on coal burned locally. To the extent that some individual European countries have converted to renewables on the large scale, they do so by “outsourcing” their pollution on a similar basis, as well as depending on their more fossil fuel-intensive neighbors for load balancing since renewable sources (except hydro) are intermittent.
Going out on a limb here that you are living in the US. With the exchange rate, my gasoline costs approximately $2.85 USD / USG. This includes a $0.15 USD/USG carbon tax and I wouldn’t say that it is a huge problem and I would agree that even with that tiny carbon tax the real externalities are not priced in. Higher fuel costs increase the price of most everything but who gets to pick the winners and loosers? Are you picking your local winners over the clear loosers in the maldives who are going to loose their entire island? Do they get to come live in your home now that you have taken theirs from them? How about closer to home in Miami. Will they get to come live with you when they can no longer afford to keep the tidewater out?
I get the impression that you are happy with the current winners and loosers since you (apparantly) don’t want fuels to cost what they really should. Do you really know who the current loosers are of this policy?
I’m not getting what the alternative is; just burn all the fossil fuels until there’s none left, and then look around for an alternative fuel source when there’s no resources to fuel that? You’re not one o’ them Greens, are ya?
The point of my comment was not to propose alternatives. I just wanted to point out that you should not believe the OP because it is very misleading. If you prefer to be misled, that is your prerogative. But I don’t think we’ll ever find a real solution to our energy problems if people keep hiding their heads in the sand believing that solar panels and CFLs are going to save the day.
But since you’re asking, I think the best alternatives would be to use less energy. To look for tradeoffs where we get the most value and keep those uses, whereas less profitable uses of energy should be discontinued.
Like for example, ban air travel. It has never been profitable, it’s only ever been viable through public subsidies. And it’s incredibly wasteful in terms of fossil fuel. Instead of flying of to Davos a few months ago, Cory could have…not flown to Davos.
How about bottled water? If we could do away with that it might help a lot. Industrial agriculture uses incredible amounts of fossil fuel, but small scale labor-intensive farming is more productive on a per-acre basis. We have a lot of people looking for jobs, and the only advantages of industrial agriculture are low labor inputs and (therefore) low costs. Let’s pay more for food, spend less on gadgets and HBO, and employ more people in small scale agriculture.
Let’s find ways to use cars less instead of trying to make cars that hide their pollution up a “long tailpipe”. Let’s have a culture based on face-to-face interaction and human relationships rather than mass media broadcasts and Facebook. There’s lots of alternatives, but electric cars and solar panels are really more of the same old thing – their manufacture is woven into the fabric of fossil fuel-powered industrial society.
Let’s assume that every joule of energy that goes into making a solar panel or wind turbine comes from fossil fuels. The relevant metric here is EROEI - energy returned on energy invested. For solar PV, panels produce anywhere from 5.9 to 60 kWh for each kWh needed to produce them. For wind it is 20 to 50. (For hydro, close to 100, but there’s less opportunity to build more). Over the life of the PV or wind turbine, total fossil fuel demand will be 5 to 59 kWh lower than it would have been if we used the fossil fuels directly.
Plus, that is electrical energy. It takes 3-5 kWh of fossil fuels to make 1kWh of electrical energy in a power plant, so you’re actually saving 3-5x as much.
By comparison, the EROEI for mining fossil fuels ranges from 5-40, with coal on the high and and oil and gas near the low end. I.e. the same range as renewables. So if you need to produce 1kWh of electricity, you can spend fossil fuels to extract fossil fuels and burn them, or you can spend the same amount of fossil fuels (plus 2.5%-20% needed to extract more fossil fuels) to produce renewable power equipment, and end up using 5 to 59 times less in total.
Over time, btw, EROEI for renewables has been steadily rising as we get better manufacturing methods, while that of fossil fuels has been steadily falling as we go after harder to reach sources.
And yes, I’m well aware that a lot of world energy usage is thermal and/or mobile rather than electrical and grid connected. I’m not pretending we could switch to all renewables tomorrow. Electrical energy storage is not yet ready to solve that problem at the scale we will need once intermittent renewables reach sufficiently high grid penetration, let alone all other applications. This is a separate problem that won’t matter until renewables grow several to maybe 10 times larger than they are now, and that many companies are already working on.
You’re argument does not hold water even on its own terms. In reality, not all the energy needed to make PV and wind turbines comes from fossil fuels, and the proportion decreases over time as the energy mix shifts toward renewables.
For solar PV, panels produce anywhere from 5.9 to 60 kWh for each kWh needed to produce them. For wind it is 20 to 50
Theoretically. Empirically, these numbers are far lower.
Empirically, the low ends of those ranges seem to be correct. Wind is about 18 and solar is about 6.
However, EROEI analyses do not take into account all system-wide costs. To some extent, EROEI is an apples to oranges comparison. Life-cycle analyses are better, but still not complete apples-to-apples comparisons.
Solar and wind are intermittent, which means:
To guarantee enough capacity at peak times, they need to be WAAAAAY overbuilt. If you are only generating 20% max wind output at peak times then you need 5X your peak capacity to be built out. That’s a huge amount of infrastructure!
OOOOOR you can store it. But you have to build a hell of a lot of batteries, which is still a huge amount of infrastructure.
If you take this into account in the EROEI calculations, wind and solar are suddenly the most expensive energy sources on earth.
By comparison, the EROEI for mining fossil fuels ranges from 5-40, with coal on the high and and oil and gas near the low end. I.e. the same range as renewables.
Wikipedia seems to think those numbers are waaaay low. I’m going to have to ask you to cite sources at this point. Seems like you might be using some “alternative facts” here. Even so, the figures you cite go from comparable to solar’s best case to twice as good as wind’s best case.
Are you sure your wind EROEI figures for wind are factoring in the energy required to mine the aluminum, the energy required to smelt it, and the energy required to extract all the fossil fuels needed to generate that energy? How about ship it and set it up? They are usually put on hilltops, and they’re quite heavy.
You’re argument does not hold water even on its own terms.
My argument is: building more solar panels and electric cars will increase the price of fossil fuels in the short and medium term.
How did anything you’ve said disprove that? How did anything you’ve written even address that?
In reality, not all the energy needed to make PV and wind turbines comes from fossil fuels, and the proportion decreases over time as the energy mix shifts toward renewables.
The mix has only significantly “shifted towards renewables” if you zoom in on the Netherlands or the USA or other rich countries. If you look on a global basis, the proportion of energy derived from hydroelectric excluding nuclear is barely a blip.
I’m still unsure about what you propose for alternatives. A couple of years back, we put solar panels on the roof our our house, and our electrical bill went from $400+ to under $50. We may not be 100% off the grid, but we are dipping our beak far less in the well. My new job lets me walk to work, so one of our cars is effectively a backup. We do as much as we can to (reduce, reuse, recycle) our carbon footprint, but there are still going to be instances that require more.
You want to do away with air travel, yet you promote face to face contact, and not over the internet. You have just shrunk my world by at least 60%, and I am still going to occasionally get on a plane to see my relatives, because the alternatives just ain’t there yet. There are so many holes in your theory of agricultural commerce that I can’t begin to enumerate them. Right now, you are letting ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good’.
Yeah, that’s where I saw him tip his hand to show a social rather than economic agenda. Modern communications saves far more energy than it consumes. Just compare the energy & labor cost of an email vs snail mail. Funny, I didn’t hear anything about small urban living, bet he lives in a huge house in the middle of nowhere rather than an energy efficient small attached city rowhouse.
I think of Mormons (and Amish and Mennonites) as examples of a form of socialism, actually. They aren’t self-reliant at all; they’re very much interdependent. So much so that being cast out is considered the greatest punishment.
I grew up in the suburbs. My graduating class of 600 had one black guy who was also gay. He had a great personality and lots of friends, but it was tough for him.Even I stood out as half mexican with olive skin. Things are slowly changing, especially in the city where I now live, but it’s still pretty white here.
He makes some good TANSTAAFL points, but he definitely starts getting into James Howard Kunstler territory once he starts discussing those specific prescriptions. Kunstler characterises the utopian community in the post-oil future he envisions as an “enlightened nineteenth century” lifestyle of self-sufficiency, but all it ends up being is a glorification of manorialism (with unintentionally creepy sexist undertones).
I got stuck in SLC for about a week about 20 years ago. I got to go to the tabernacle and a punk show on the same day, and then back at the hostel I taught a japanese kid who loved baseball and was touring american ballparks, the words to the National Anthem. The other time I was there a tornado hit downtown as I drove away. Your town is weird.
You’re right that I misread the same EROEI graph from Wikipedia, and oil and gas are in the 10-20 range, my apologies. I don’t know whether the particular studies Wikipedia sites account for all those things, but I’ve taken college classes on energy modeling and done the calculations myself in the past. Even with ridiculously pessimistic assumption (i.e. every dollar of cost comes from energy and none from labor or capex etc.) EROEI still comes out much higher than 1. Also, most of the energy involved in producing aluminum products is the electricity used in smelting, it vastly outweighs fuel for mining/shipping/installation. And the electricity is the resource that can most easily come from non-fossil sources, though today it mostly doesn’t/
Your point about capacity factor is irrelevant, because EROEI already accounts for that. It’s energy actually coming out of the system over it’s lifetime in the numerator, not nameplate capacity.
I agree with you about storage.
I also agree with you about current electricity sources. But no matter how pessimistic you are capacity factor, a quick glance at recent years shows that my claim about the direction (rising proportion of renewables globally) is accurate.
As for not even addressing your claims… who cares about the short and medium term? I’d be thrilled to increase fossil fuel demand over the next decade if that bought humanity a substantial long-term decline. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries, it isn’t like most other pollutants. If I could double fossil fuel consumption for a decade to build infrastructure to permanently convert all electricity production to renewables, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
