The EROI of Photovoltaic Energy is now Higher than that of Crude Oil has Ever Been.

This is an article that I published today in the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano." As a discussion, it is not very deep -- of course, it is written for the general public and these articles have a limit of 650 words. Yet, I think not many people, even among energy specialists, have realized the silent revolution that has turned photovoltaic energy from an expensive, niche technology into something that has an EROEI higher than that of petroleum in the "golden days." Don't expect it to "replace fossil fuels," as some people would expect it to do. It is a different technology, with different capabilities, different applications, with its strong and weak points. But it is starting to change the world, and it will. 

How about hydrogen, the subject of this blog? Well, if we have cheap and abundant energy from PV, we could use hydrogen to store it. But that is an expensive storage solution and will be used (if it is ever used) when all the other possibilities have been exhausted.

 

Photovoltaic Energy is an Opportunity that the Country Should not Miss

Imagine a bank account that pays you 100% interest  That is, after you have deposited 1000 euros, it gives you another thousand euros at the end of the year, and so on every year. You would like a bank account like that!

Obviously, there is no bank account that yields so much, but there are technologies that yield at such levels, albeit not in monetary but in energy terms. There is an article published this month by Fthenakis and Leccisi which reviews the situation and finds a truly excellent yield of photovoltaic technology due to the technological improvements of the last 5-7 years. In practice, for good insolation, as we could have in Southern Europe, a photovoltaic system returns the energy needed to build it in about a year! We are now at the levels of oil during its heyday, when it was abundant and cheap, and perhaps even oil was not doing so well at that time.

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That of Fthenakis and Leccisi is not the only article that comes to this conclusion, all recent studies on the subject come to similar conclusions. A very recent article in “EDP Science” . Basically, the electricity produced by photovoltaic plants is often the cheapest in absolute terms, the growth of installations continues to exceed forecasts, and we are now talking about the "photovoltaic revolution." We face the real possibility of eliminating fossil fuels once and for all from the global energy system.

Now, I know that you are already with your fingers on the keyboard to write in the comments "but the variability?" "I don't want to see panels in front of my house!" "And how about waste ?" and things like that. I know. Everyone knows these things. However, think about that.

We have a technology that costs less than the others, and which is particularly suited to Italy, “the country of the sun.” It allows us to produce energy in our home without having to import it at a high price. We also have the added benefit of having mountains that we can use for storing  energy in the form of hydroelectric reservoirs. There are many other ways to manage variability - it's not an unsolvable problem . Then, about waste and recycling, we will have to invest in it, of course. But keep in mind that photovoltaic systems do not use rare or polluting materials. They can be recycled without major problems and we will certainly do so in the future. At the moment, it is a marginal problem.

In short, photovoltaic energy is an opportunity that we should not miss to relaunch the "country system" in Italy. And, indeed, things are going pretty well. In Italy we have reached 10% of electricity production from photovoltaic energy and it is a good result from which we can start decarbonise to truly the energy system. Certain things seem to have been understood nationally. You can read it in the "Pniec", Integrated National Plan for Energy and Climate, which provides for a fundamental role for renewable technologies, and in particular for photovoltaic energy.

But there remains a resistance rearguard formed by a rather ill-matched coalition that includes the oil companies, the diehard nuclearists, the cold fusion miracleists, those who are still paying the bills for the diesel car they bought, and, in general, a whole section of the environmental movement that rejects any change in the name of a "degrowth" thinking that we'll be happy to stay in the dark and in the cold.

To everyone their opinions but, in practice, at this point the only thing that can block the photovoltaic revolution is bureaucracy, perhaps the only truly "infinite resource" in the universe. On this point too, the government seems to be willing to do something to streamline and speed up the procedures of installation. It won't be easy, but with a little patience, we will get there.

 

The Greens trapped in a multi-dimensional gate from the 1980s

 

 

For your curiosity, here is a picture of a street demonstration by a group of Greens against a planned wind plant on the Appennini mountains, in Italy. And, no, it is not from the 1980s. It was last week! Really. The main street signs says "No all'eolico selvaggio," that is, "No to the wild wind power"

I have no doubt that this small group of Greens who collected in the town of "Vicchio" truly believe in what they are doing (I know some of them personally). But they are a good example of the mental fog that's overtaking the minds of most people, but in particular the "Greens." They seem to find no contradiction in sponsoring carbon taxes and advocating measures to reduce emissions, while at the same time approving "green hydrogen" and protesting against all sorts of renewable energy plants (and being against nuclear energy, too!). 

Truly, they seem to have emerged out of a multi-dimensional gate, catapulted to our time from the 1980s, still holding the same signs they were showing at that time.

But so is life. One of the good things of the universe is that contradictions can't exist for long. The natural evolution of things tends to remove them. It will happen this time, too, one way or another.

Government of the lobbies, by the lobbies, for the lobbies. How can we hope to ever move in the right direction?

 

Above: a tweet by the French Minister of Transportation on June 14, 2021 -- translated into English. 

This post is not directly about hydrogen, but it deals with the capability of our politicians of planning on any field related to energy. Mr. Djebbari shows such a total misunderstanding of the quantitative aspects related to the energy transition that goes beyond mere incompetency. It cannot be a bug, it must be a feature of the system.

Djebbari's tweet was noted by Jean-Marc Jancovici, who posted a comment on Linkedin. Here it is, translated into English.

Our Transport Minister sent a tweet last night (French time) to rejoice in the upcoming flight of an A320 with only biofuels, calling it "ecology": https://lnkd.in/dWp-NpK

A few things will help to put this information in context:

- on the day the tweet was sent, there were 85000 commercial flights worldwide (https://lnkd.in/dBFQaXx). If, in order to repay a debt of EUR 85000, you tell your banker that you have found EUR 1 of income, it is unlikely that he will consider that this fundamentally changes the problem.

 

- currently, deforestation is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions each year. This deforestation has one main determinant: to remove forests to obtain agricultural land. Therefore, a question arises: does not any area devoted to energy crops be tantamount to exacerbating deforestation, by domino effect? If this same area were devoted to food, would we not avoid the associated deforestation? However, if it induces deforestation (directly or indirectly), the production of an agrofuel generates more emissions per liter than oil.

 

In its report "being able to fly in 2050", The Shift Project and SUPAERO DECARBO (which is made up of former students of ISAE, and currently working in the aeronautical sector, so they are not "painters" it seems to me) recalled that, even by selecting all the technical improvements to come in a very, very optimistic way, air traffic had to decrease for this sector to comply with the Paris Agreement. If this conclusion does not seem to you to be well-founded, it should be refuted with convincing "counter-calculations", and nothing else.

And I think it is enough to understand how wrong was Djebbari in praising Airbus and Safran for having engaged in a task that's nothing more than a good example of a greenwashing stunt. Air travel will never be based on biofuels, at least not on this planet. But just in case you would like to have some more detailed data, take a look at this post where I try to estimate how many people would die of starvation according to the fraction of the world's food supply would be allocated to produce aviation fuels. 

The situation with hydrogen is not very different, although there is no obvious limit to the amount that could be produced using renewable energy, the problems involved in converting the aviation industry to using hydrogen as fuel are nightmarish, to say the least.

Whether we deal with biofuels or with hydrogen, I think there are at least 4 hypotheses to frame the issue

1. Politicians are truly unable to grasp the simplest quantitative aspects of energy production. They are truly ignorant and careless and they refuse to be taught by those who know more than they do. That's called at times the "Dunning-Kruger Effect," but no matter how you call it, it is very common. 

2. Politicians know that they are lying, but they lie for political reasons ("white man speak with two forked tongue") In this case, the French Minister Djebbari thought he could gain a little visibility for himself by means of a potshot at Greenpeace and it is just what he did. 

3. Politicians lie because they are on the payroll of powerful lobbies. In this case, we would have to imagine that the aviation lobby, or the fossil fuel lobby, organized a little PR stunt by flying a plane on 100% biofuels and they enlisted the transport minister to give visibility to it. Of course, in this case, everybody knows it is a scam, but then this is how PR works. 

4. All the three hypotheses above are true to a certain extent.

 

So, given the situation, our government system can be defined as "by the lobbies, for the lobbies, in the name of the lobbies." I don't have to tell you that the challenge to to solve problems that are not just urgent, but vital is a little difficult.