Debating Renewables: the Clash of the Straw Men

 

(image Created by Dall-E)

There has to be some reason why we tend to polarize every issue and divide ourselves into two opposite fields engaged in a struggle of strawmen. And yet, we keep praising the "open debate" even though we know that it doesn't work, it never worked, and perhaps never will. 

Try it with renewable energy. You state that renewables are a good technology to produce energy, and you are immediately submerged by a tsunami of criticism from angry people who accuse you of wanting to destroy the planet and starve people to death in the impossible attempt to keep the economy growing. On the other side of the debate, some people really think that "sustainable development" is really nothing different from the good, old economic growth, except that it is painted in green.

Is it possible to strike a middle way? Marco Raugei, a scientist working on renewable energy, puts forward a plea for understanding each other in a recent paper published on "Biophysical Economics." With the prudence typical of the scientist, Raugei starts with, "There appears to be a growing polarization." My gosh! Marco, did you really say "there appears to be"???  But the paper makes a very simple point, unfortunately almost always obscured in the clash of the titanic strawmen. It is that it is perfectly possible to use renewable energy to replace fossil fuels, but the resulting world will not be the same as it is today. And this possibility doesn't free us from the constraints that a finite world poses on economic growth. So simple, and so impossible to understand!

Let me propose to you a few excerpts from Raugei's paper:  

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From: 

Addressing a Counterproductive Dichotomy in the Energy Transition Debate

By Marco Raugei, Biophysical economics, 8, Article number: 4 (2023)

...several academic authors have increasingly positioned themselves (either explicitly or implicitly, but often equally unmistakably) within either of two seemingly ideological “camps.” These may be broadly characterized as, respectively, that of the “systemic pessimists” (i.e., authors who champion concepts such as carrying capacity, overpopulation, overshoot, peak oil, and peak resources, but who often downplay or even dismiss the potential of renewable energies) and that of the “technological optimists” (i.e., authors who mostly tend to focus on the rapid advancements in renewable energy technologies and the promise that these hold to decarbonize future societies, while often failing to address the broader context of other bio-physical planetary limits). While proponents of both camps often bring valid arguments and evidence to the table to support their viewpoints, they often seem to summarily dismiss the arguments and evidence put forth by the other camp, thereby ultimately allowing the discourse to degenerate into an unhelpful and, arguably, un-scientific “us vs. them” contest.

In the 1970s, the Club of Rome (a group of current and former politicians, United Nations administrators, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe) commissioned the famous report “The limits to growth” (Meadows et al. 1972), in which the consequences of unconstrained population and economic growth were quantitatively investigated by means of a computer model based on five key interdependent variables: population, agricultural production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation. Widespread and long-lasting debate and controversy ensued on many details about the model structure, parameters, and assumptions, but the key message was clear, and it was essentially found to still hold by several other authors who reviewed and updated the calculations (Bardi 2011; Herrington 2020; Hall 2022): the Earth’s system is incapable of supporting infinite population and economic growth because of the finite nature of its natural resources.

More recently, a range of authors have taken it upon themselves to reaffirm these fundamental concepts within the specific context of future energy scenarios. But a new dimension to the discussion had been added in the interim, as various independent studies, often based on life cycle assessments (LCA), had started to appear, pointing to high energy return on investment (EROI) of renewable energies, and specifically photovoltaics (PVs). By some, these results were interpreted as undermining the very foundations of the concepts discussed above, for if renewable energy were indefinitely viable then perhaps the “limits to growth” could be postponed indefinitely. As a result, what was originally a discussion about finite resources in a more general sense, started turning into much more specific arguments about issues like what is the proper EROI for PVs and/or other renewables; broadly speaking, the debate on the ultimate possibilities of renewable energies became unhelpfully conflated with whether or not there are limits to growth.

In fact, some of these authors (e.g., Seibert and Reese 2021) have tended to paint renewable energies as a pernicious distraction from the key issue of global overshoot of the Earth’s carrying capacity, therefore also brushing aside any suggestion of renewable energies’ ability to significantly reduce global warming and environmental degradation (vs. the continued use of fossil fuels). ... “technological optimistic” authors may have studiously and rigorously investigated the potential of renewable energies to deliver modern societies from the grip of fossil fuels, but they have failed to consider the wider issues that would continue to affect the world, even in a future world largely supported by renewable energies. In fact, the hitherto dominating paradigm of unfettered growth in material consumption and rampant exploitation of many natural and ecosystem resources is incompatible with fundamental bio-physical constraints (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015), and it remains ultimately unsustainable irrespective of which energy resources are used to power it.

...the current polarization of views points to a false dichotomy that risks devaluing both positions, and it trivializes what should instead be the most important research questions of all, namely: to which extent a more sustainable future is indeed possible, and which systemic changes (including, but not limited to, phasing out fossil fuels) will be required to achieve it. ... Ultimately, it is high time to admit that both sets of core arguments loosely ascribed in this article to the two opposed ideological “camps” are probably simultaneously true, to some extent at least. And from this simple realization follows what should have been obvious all along, i.e., that adopting a more balanced “middle way” approach is the only truly sensible way forward for a healthy and genuinely scientific debate. 

The complete paper by Marco Raugei is available at this link

The Next One Hundred Years: A Story Told in Three Scenarios

 

Looking back at how the future was seen half a century ago, it is amazing to see how things have changed. When the conquest of space seemed to be the obvious way forward, nobody would have imagined that, today, we would be discussing the probability of survival of humankind, and that many of us would judge it as low. 

Yet, even though the future remains obscure, it still follows the laws of the universe. And one of these laws is that civilizations exist because they have a supply of energy. No energy, no civilization. So, the key element of the future is energy; the idea that it would be cheap and abundant gave rise to the dream of the conquest of space in the 1950s. Today, the idea that it will be neither gives rise to the prospects of doom. 

So, let me try a simple "scenario analysis" of what may happen in the future in the next century or so in terms of choices that will determine the energy infrastructure that could support a complex civilization (if any will survive). We are in a moment of transition, and the choices that will be made in the next few years (not decades) will determine the future of humankind. 

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Scenario #0: collapse. I call this a "non-scenario" in the sense that it assumes that nothing is done or, anyway, too little and too late. In this case, people remain stuck in their old paradigms, the resources that kept society alive are not replaced, and it becomes impossible to maintain a degree of complexity comparable to the current one. Within some decades, humans return to an economy that we might describe as "medieval," if we are lucky. But we might also go back to hunting and gathering or even, simply, go extinct. Personally, I see this scenario as the most likely one, but not an obligate outcome of the current situation. 

Scenario #1: Sticking to Fossil Fuels. Here, we see a repetition of the events that led to stemming the decline of oil production during the first two decades of the 20th century. It was done by pouring large amounts of resources into the "fracking" of tight oil deposits. It produced a temporary resurrection of the oil industry in the US, bringing production to levels never seen before, albeit at enormous economic and environmental costs. The same policy could be continued with renewed efforts, for instance, at exploiting tight oil deposits outside the United States, tar sands, or maybe making synthetic fuels out of coal. That could maintain the production of fossil fuels to levels similar to the current ones. It would make it possible to keep alive the military apparatuses of the main states, and at least some of the current organizations and social structures. But the cost would be enormous, and it would imply beggaring most of the world's population, as well as unimaginable damage to the ecosystem. This strategy could keep a semblance of the current civilization going on for a few decades, hardly more than the end of the century. Then, it will be Scenario #0, but the crash will be even worse than if it had arrived by doing nothing.

Scenario #2: Going Nuclear. Supporting a complex society on nuclear energy may be possible, but it is complicated by several factors. Among these are the limited uranium resources, the need for rare mineral resources for the plants, and the strategic problems involved in disseminating nuclear technologies and uranium processing knowledge all over the world. Because of the limited amounts of mineral uranium, it is well known that the existing technology of light water reactors would not be able to supply the current global energy demand for more than a few decades, at best for a century or so. Then the outcome would be again scenario #0. The fuel supply could be greatly increased by moving to the challenging task of "breeding" new fuels from thorium or non-fissile uranium. If that were possible, a complex civilization could continue to exist for several centuries, or even more. In all cases, a major war that would target the nuclear plants would rapidly send a nuclear civilization to scenario #0.

Scenario #3: The Solar Era. In this case, we see the continuation of the current trend that sees renewable energy technologies, mainly solar photovoltaic and wind, rapidly expanding. If this expansion continues, it can make both fossil fuels and nuclear energy obsolete. Renewable technologies have a good energy return on energy investment (EROI) and little need for rare minerals. Renewables are not a strategic problem, have no direct military interest, and can be used everywhere. The plants can be recycled, and they are expected to be able to support a complex society; even though in a form that, today, we can only barely imagine. A solar-based infrastructure is also naturally forced to reach a certain degree of stability because of the limited flux of solar energy available. So, a solar-based civilization could reach a stable state that could last at least as long as agricultural societies did in the past, thousands of years, or even longer.

Combined Scenarios #1, #2, #3: Feudalization. The three scenarios above are based on the idea that human civilization remains reasonably "global." In this case, the competition between different technologies would play out at a global scale and determine a winner that would take over the whole energy market. But that's not necessarily the case if the world's economic systems separate into independent sections, as it appears to be happening right now. In this case, some regions might adopt different strategies, fossils, nuclear, or renewables, while some would simply be shut off from the energy supply system and go directly to "Scenario #0."  With lower demand, the problems of depletion of nuclear and fossils would be greatly eased, although, of course, only for a limited population. Note also that these near-independent regions can be described as "feudal," but need to be much larger and more structured than anything seen during the historical Middle Ages. Keeping alive complex technologies, nuclear in particular, requires maintaining a functioning industrial society, and that may not be obvious in a time of diminishing returns for everything. 

The next few decades will decide which direction humankind will take. No one has the hands on the wheel that moves the giant thing we call "civilization," and we are seeing efforts to push it in one of the three scenarios above (some people even seem to be actively pushing for scenario #0, a civilization-level expression of what Sigmund Freud called the "death instinct"). 

The problem, here, is that the Western governance system has evolved in such a way that no decision can be taken unless some groups or sectors of society are demonized, and then a narrative is created that implies fighting a common enemy. In other words, no decision can be taken on the basis of data and planning for the common good, but only as the result of the confrontation of the lobbies involved in supporting different options. (*)

We have seen the demonization-based decision mechanism operating during the past few decades. It is a well-honed procedure, and we may expect it to be also applied to the allocation of resources for new energy strategies. We have already seen an energy technology being demonized;  it was the case of nuclear energy in the 1970s, the target of a successful propaganda campaign that presented it as an enemy of humankind. Today, renewables and everything "green" may soon be the victims of a new demonization campaign designed to promote nuclear energy. We are seeing it in its early stages, (see this article by George Monbiot), but it is clearly growing and having a certain degree of success.

Nothing is decided yet, but the writing is on the blades of the wind turbines. Propaganda rules the world, and it will continue ruling it as long as people fall for it. 

(*) Simon Sheridan provides an interesting discussion of the inner decisional mechanisms of modern society, defined as "esoteric" in the sense of being hidden, unlike the "exoteric," e.g. public decisional mechanism, which is only a reflection of the esoteric process. 

(**) For much longer-term scenarios, see my post: "The Next Ten Billion Years" 

Data without interpretation are useless, interpretation without data is dangerous. More on "non replaceable" energy

 

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat," Sun Tzu. (Image created with Dezgo.com)

I am always amazed by how people tend to see the world in terms of "self-evident" statements which the don't see as requiring demonstration, quantification, or verification. It is like if they were rewriting the American Declaration of Independence (We hold these truths to be self-evident...). But whereas things such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are hard to quantify, when you deal with physical entities such as renewable energy, then quantification is not only possible, but vital. 

On this point, Sun Tzu would have said that interpretation without quantification is dangerous because by dismissing renewable technologies you are disbanding your best troops without giving them a chance to prove their mettle in a real confrontation. 

Here, as an example, a recent post by Tim Morgan where we read a long discussion, interesting in many respects, but completely disconnected from real-world data. 

This is where the term “renewable” ought to be subjected to far more critical examination than it has tended to receive so far. We can’t source the plastics required for the renewables sector without hydrocarbon feedstocks. Renewables can’t, of themselves, power the extraction, processing and delivery of the vast amounts of concrete, steel, copper, cobalt, lithium and a host of other resources required for the development, maintenance and eventual replacement of wind and solar power.

In short, “renewables” would merit that label only if they were capable of renewing – that is to say, replacing – themselves over time. This isn’t possible now, and there are few reasons to suppose that it will become so in the future.

Morgan is not the only one who keeps repeating the mantra that renewables are unable to replace themselves without worrying too much about justifying his statement, something that would require, at minimum, demonstrating that the energy yield of renewable technology is too low for this purpose. But there is no attempt to do that in the post. 

Eventually, it doesn't matter what intellectuals are saying; the real world is moving along the path created by physics. The lines are drawn for a battle that's going to be fought over the carrion of the fossil fuel industry. Victory will go to those who can follow Sun Tzu's statement that “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” And onward we'll go! 

(For a quantification of the capability of renewables to expand and replace themselves, see these references: 

100% Renewable Energy Transition by Kemfelt, Breyer, and Oei. 2020

On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research, Breyer et al, 2022

Rethinking Energy 2020-2030, Dorr and Seba, 2022

The sower's way: quantifying the narrowing net-energy pathways to a global energy transition, Sgoruirdis, Csala, and Bardi, 2016

Energy Return on Investment of Major Energy Carriers: Review and Harmonization, Murphy et al., 2022

And many more....)

But what is this EROI (Energy Return on Energy Invested)? And why is it so Important?

 

If you are a lion, you don't just have to run faster than a gazelle; you have to make sure that the metabolic energy you obtain from eating the gazelle is higher than the energy you used for the chase. If not, you die. It is the harsh law of the EROI. 

The concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI or EROEI) has been around for a long time. It was introduced in its modern form in the 1980s by Charles Hall, but it is steeped in the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems. It can be easily understood if you see it as the equivalent of ROI (return on investment). ROI (EROI) is given by the money (energy) returned from a certain investment (energy infrastructure) divided by the monetary (energy) investment. You need a value larger than one in order for your investment to make sense or, if you are a lion, to survive. Large values of this parameter make life easy for investors, energy producers, and lions (although not for gazelles). (*)

Up to recent times, the conventional wisdom was that the EROI of fossil fuels was very high: during the heyday of oil extraction, it was said to be been around 100. Think of an investment that brings back to you back your capital multiplied by one hundred (!!), and you can understand why oil was, and remains, so important for our society. At the same time, the EROI of renewable energy was calculated to be of the order of 5-7, with some studies even placing it under 1. That gave rise to the narrative that only oil and other fossil fuels could sustain an industrial civilization and that renewables were not really so; at best they were "replaceables" as long as there was oil available. The consequence was an emphasis on social and political solutions: degrowth, energy saving, return to a rural economy, or, simply, accepting that we are all going to die soon. 

How fast things change! New studies, including one by Murphy et al., revealed that the EROI of oil may never have been so high. You need to take into account that oil in itself is useless: it needs to be transported, refined, and burned inside inefficient engines to provide energy for society. So, it is correct to calculate the EROI of oil at the "point of use" rather than at the "well mouth." Once that's done, it turns out that oil's EROI may well be (and have been) lower than 10. At the same time, technological progress and scale factors led to an improvement in the EROI of renewables (wind and photovoltaics) well over 10. 

Now, the paradigm is reversed. Renewables are truly renewable, while oil never was. That gives us a chance to revisit the dominant paradigm of how to face the energy crisis. The new paradigm is that we can rebuild a society that works on renewable power. It won't be the same as the one created by oil, and we may have to accept a considerable economic contraction in the process to get there. But it gives us a fighting chance to create a resilient and prosperous society. 

Of course, not everyone agrees on these concepts and there is a lively discussion in which several people are defending the old paradigm. One argument in the discussion says that if you use oil energy to refine oil, that energy should not be  counted in the denominator of the EROI ratio. And, therefore, that the EROI of fossil fuels is much larger than what the recent calculations indicate. This is silly: energy is energy, it doesn't matter where it comes from. Nafeez Ahmed discusses this point in detail in his blog, "The Age of Transformation" saying, among other things, that:

.... petroleum geologist Art Berman published a post also claiming that Murphy et. al’s paper is fundamentally incorrect. He concluded that if Murphy and his co-authors were right, then decades of EROI research showing extremely high values for fossil fuels would be wrong. He repeats the same argument as Hagens, and then uses it to offer a new calculation:

Nearly 9% of the total post-extraction costs for oil are for refining. Yet most of the energy for refining comes from the crude oil and refined products used in the refinery. It is, in effect, co-generated. That doesn’t negate the energy investment needed to operate the refinery but it is not a cost to society as indicated in the table… I divided their 8.9% for refining investment by 3 to account for the co-generation described above (it is probably much lower). The resulting oil EROI is 18. That completely removes the good news from Ahmed’s and Bardi’s proclamations of ‘mission accomplished’ and restores oil EROI to the consensus range for the last two decades.

The key error in this argument is where Berman says: “That doesn’t negate the energy investment needed to operate the refinery but it is not a cost to society as indicated in the table.”

But that is incorrect. The term ‘cost to society’ pertains precisely to energy invested which is not available for use by society. While the energy used to refine the crude oil is co-generated, it is still an input into the refinement process before the oil becomes available for actual work in society at the ‘final energy’ stage. In other words, the energy is being used to refine the oil and is therefore not available for society in any case.

What Berman and Hagens are effectively trying to do is classify the energy used to refine oil as an ‘energy output’ that represents useful work for society outside of the energy system. But this classification doesn’t make sense when we consider that it represents work that is specifically related to making the energy usable for society in the first place - because the oil must be refined and processed before it can actually be converted into usable energy for society.

Berman further questions that if EROI for fossil fuels was much lower, how could it have been so profitable?

As earth system scientist Ugo Bardi has pointed out, the profitability of an industry depends on numerous factors outside the energy system related to credit, markets, economic policy, investment, currency values and beyond. But in addition to that, the bottom line is that Murphy et. al’s research suggests that if oil has been profitable with EROI much lower than previously believed, then previous assumptions about economic prosperity requiring much higher EROI levels are questionable.

Because of the huge efficiency losses of converting energy from oil into useable forms (between 50 and 70% of energy is lost converting primary energy to final energy), as renewables avoid those losses they can produce about 50% less energy to meet demand. This means that the presumed minimum EROI to sustain a viable civilisation derived from fossil fuels could be much lower in a more efficient system.

As Marco Raugei points out, the shift to renewables and electrification “may open the door to achieving the required services with much lower demand for primary energy, which in turn entails that a significantly lower EROI than previously assumed may suffice”.

To learn more about EROI, you can look at these papers

The Role of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) in Complex Adaptive Systems, by Ilaria Perissi, Alessandro Lavacchi, and Ugo Bardi), Energies, 2021

Peaking Dynamics of the Production Cycle of a Nonrenewable Resource, by Ilaria Perissi, Alessandro Lavacchi, and Ugo Bardi, Sustainability 2023

Godzilla's Egg: Why Renewables Will Never Replace Fossil Fuels (Or Maybe They Will?)

An early incarnation of the most famous Japanese monster. Source

Being a reptile (maybe), Godzilla is supposed to be born from an egg. But it would be a big mistake to think that the adult beast will be small because the egg is small. Something similar applies to renewable energy, often criticized because it provides only a small fraction of the total energy in the world. In this post, I examine the "Godzilla's Egg Paradox" in view of two recent books, "How the World Really Works" by Vaclav Smil, and "The Economic Superorganism" by Carey King. 

The concept that "renewables will never be able to..." takes many forms, perhaps the most common one being that they provide today just a minor fraction of the energy produced by fossil fuels. And, hence, this fraction is destined to remain small. I often use the joke that it is the same as saying that Godzilla couldn't be but a small beast judging from the size of its egg.

A recent restatement of the Godzilla's egg problem can be found in the book by Vaclav Smil, "How the World Really Works." (Viking, 2022). Honestly, it is a disappointing book, especially comparing its content with the ambitious title. Not that there is anything specifically wrong with it. Smil has excellent capabilities of reporting quantitative data; his approach is simple and direct; a good example is his analysis of the average risks faced by an ordinary person in terms of their probability and frequency. 

But this book? Well, it reports a lot of data, but all in a conversational form, not a single diagram, not even a table. Maybe it is the way a book has to be if it has to become a "New York Times International Bestseller." After all, it is known that most people cannot understand cartesian diagrams. Yet, data are not sufficient if they are not interpreted in a correct time frame, and Smil's analysis is almost always static; it tells you about the current situation but not how we arrived at it nor what we can expect in the future.

The problem is especially visible with Smil's treatment of renewable energy. The whole discussion on energy is weak, to say nothing of the typical mistake of reporting that, during the oil crisis of the 1970s, OPEC (the organization of oil exporting countries) "set the prices" of oil. OPEC does not and cannot do anything like that, although its management of oil production surely affects prices.

About renewables, the main point that Smil makes is that, today, they represent only a small fraction of the world's energy production. Considering the huge task ahead, he concludes that renewables would need a very long time to replace fossil fuels, if they ever will. The main problem in this discussion is that Smil does not use the "EROI" (energy returned for energy invested) parameter. This parameter tells you that, nowadays, renewable energy is more efficient and yields more than fossil fuels and any other energy production technology. Missing this point, the whole discussion is flawed. Renewables can, and will grow rapidly, at least in the short term future. And, in the medium and long run they are destined to replace the inferior technology of fossil fuels. The same is true for many other data reported; they remain scarcely useful if not analyzed in a way that gives some idea of how they are going to evolve and change. Paradoxically, what this book lacks is exactly what the title promises: an explanation of how the world works.

The weakness of Smil's arguments does not mean that renewables will quickly replace fossil fuels. One thing is what is feasible, and another is what can actually be done within the limitations of time and resources. For some dynamic scenarios of their possible growth, you may take a look at a paper that I wrote together with my colleagues Sgouridis and Csala. It is a little old (2016), but its basic methods and conclusions are still valid. And the conclusion is that it is possible to replace fossil fuels with renewables, but not easy. What we can say at present is that renewables are growing fast: will they hatch into a full-size Godzilla, able to overcome the obstacles it faces?  

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If you really want to know how the world works and what role energy has in it, you can learn a lot more from Carey King's book "The Economic Superorganism" (Springer 2021). It is the opposite of Smil's book in terms of methodology. King's approach is based on the fundamental tenets of biophysical economics: it is an attempt to explain how the world's economic metabolism functions and dynamically evolves. Hence the title, "superorganism," a way to define the economic system in terms akin to that of a biological system (I prefer to use the term "holobiont" but it is the same idea.)

The idea that the economy is a superorganism derives from the concept that energy drives the economy, just like it does for living beings. The Economic Superorganism book provides stories, data, science, and philosophy to guide readers through the arguments from competing narratives on energy, growth, and policy. Among many other good things, it is remarkable for its honest attempt to present different points of view in a balanced way. It also helps to distinguish the technically possible from the socially viable, and understand how our future depends on this distinction. At global scales, the combination of resource-rich environment, coordination in groups, corporations and nations, and the maximization of financial surplus, tethered to energy and carbon, results in a mindless, energy-hungry, CO2 emitting Superorganism (a concept also examined in depth by Nate Hagens).

Now, the superorganism is in trouble. Just like living beings, it risks dying of starvation. Could it be a good thing, considering how the economic leviathan has damaged more or less everything in the biosphere? Or perhaps it is still possible to tame the big beast and force it to behave a little better. Maybe. Even though we may all be just cells of a huge beast, there is a lot that you can learn from this book. Unfortunately, even though it is clearly written and well argumented, it will never be a New York Times Bestseller. And that may be one of the reasons why the superorganism deserves to collapse.

And how about renewables? King's book doesn't take a yes/no position, and correctly so. It provides instead a complete discussion of the various facets of the issue. Just the description of the value of the EROI concept is worth the whole book. And, eventually, we'll go where the superorganism takes us.

Solving Renewables' Communication Problem. Don't Tell, Show!

 

Renewable Energy has a serious problem of communication: most people don't understand it. Since all communication is based on storytelling, I propose to face it by using the technique used in storytelling called "Don't tell, show." Telling people that renewables can produce energy is not enough; we need to show that they are useful. And that means focusing on "resilience." (image source)

Years ago, a colleague of mine told me a story about the photovoltaic plant he had installed, one of the first in Italy. He said that a high-rank politician came to visit it. To show him that the plant was really working, my colleague connected its output to a small electric heater, showing how the resistive heating elements could be rapidly brought to a nice red glow. The politician refused to believe that the energy came from the PV panels, and he asked, "Where is the trick?" Apparently, he left still unconvinced.  

I have my own stories about this kind of cognitive dissonance, and you probably have yours. Many people don't deny that renewables can produce energy but consider them little more than nice toys for Greens. Come on, to really produce energy, you need to burn something; coal, oil, or gas; you need a big fire and engines turning. Otherwise, it is a joke, no more than that. 

You can see this attitude expressed, over and over, in the comments on social media. In its basic form, it goes as, "Renewable energy will never be able to replace fossil fuels." Similar statements are common, including the idea that renewables are not really renewable but "substitutable" or "replaceable," meaning that fossil fuels will always be needed to replace old plants as they wear out. Normally, these statements are presented as self-evident, and some people seem to be offended and to become aggressive when told that the opposite may be true.  

Contrasting this attitude using data is nearly impossible. The scientific argument in favor of renewables is mostly based on life cycle analysis (LCA) that currently leads to favorable estimates for their EROI (energy return for energy invested). It means that renewables can be recycled and can sustain a circular economy. But most people (including politicians) don't understand EROI. They don't understand that the uncertainty in the EROI estimates is typical of all scientific matters; they want certainties. The attitude of scientists does not help. They tend to avoid public debates and disseminate their results only as papers in scientific journals. Papers that nobody reads and which are ignored when it is time to make policy choices. It is the same problem we have with climate science. 

So, I believe we have to change tack. Since all communication is based on storytelling, we may use a well-known rule in storytelling that says, "Do not tell, show!" That is, it is not enough to tell people about quantitative estimates of this or that. We need to show people how renewable energy can be useful for them here and now, not a hundred years from now,

It is, in the end, a question of positioning: in the current historical phase, renewables can be seen as a tool for resilience, a concept that most people understand and appreciate. Many people interpret this idea in terms of PV panels on their roofs and batteries at home as an emergency supply in case of blackouts. It is not a bad idea in itself, but it is expensive, and many people don't have the kind of space needed to install PV panels. "Resilience" is a wider concept, and, at present, it implies not only a defense against blackouts but a most needed help for people who are facing high energy prices affecting their activities and their personal budgets. 

In Italy, we are experimenting with an interesting initiative called "Energy Communities," legislation that allows citizens to link together their energy production plants, forming a local community that gives advantages to both producers and consumers. These communities are on a small scale, but the same concept can be enlarged as a general barrier against emergencies and supply disruption. It is a question of networking at various scales. It also includes large-scale plants; they are certainly more efficient than home-based ones. But they need to be accepted by the public, otherwise it is hopeless. 

Framing renewables in this way, we see that we are not aiming at "replacing fossil fuels." It is possible, in principle, but it can't be a short-term goal. If we aim at resilience, we don't need a 100% replacement of fossil fuels. A country like Germany already produces about 50% of its electric energy from renewable sources. At this level, the renewable infrastructure may act as a national-level UPS (uninterruptible power supply), keeping the lights on, and the essential services going (food, transportation, health care, and others). These are achievable objectives in the short and medium term. They are also steps forward to creating a truly sustainable, large scale energy system. 

My colleague had chosen the right way to tell the story when he showed a politician how he could operate an electric heater using his PV plant. But that wasn't enough. We need to show that renewables not only produce energy, but produce useful energy for the community. It will also be a concrete set of actions to fight climate change. It is the right path for the future.   

The Garden of Forking Paths: Renewables are an Opportunity we Cannot Afford to Miss

  

"El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" (J.L. Borges)

Recently, Simon Michaux argued that the transition to renewable energy is not possible for the lack of sufficient mineral resources. This conclusion was criticized by Nafeez Ahmed in a recent post. As usual in our polarized world, that led to a heated discussion based on opposing views. My opinion is that both Michaud and Ahmed are right but they see the question from different points of view. If you allow me, Ahmed is more right because he shows that the future is not running on a fixed path. Rather, it is a garden of forking paths. If we choose the right path, the transition is possible and will lead us to a better world. 

Do you remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? It tells you that you shouldn't cry wolf too many times but also that the wolf will eventually come. It illustrates how our destiny as human beings is to always choose extreme viewpoints: either we are too afraid of the wolf, or we believe it doesn't exist. Indeed, Erwin Schlesinger said, "human beings have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic." 

This dichotomy is especially visible in the current debate on the "Energy Transition" that recently flared in an exchange between Simon Michaux and Nafeez Ahmed, the first maintaining that the transition is impossible, the second arriving at the opposite conclusion. In my modest opinion, Michaud's work is correct within the limits of the assumptions he made. But these assumptions are not necessarily right. 

Models may be perfectly correct, but still unable to predict the future. 

If you really believe that they can, you are bound to make enormous mistakes -- as we saw in the way the recent pandemic was (mis)managed. 

Models are there to understand the future, not to predict it. 

The future is a garden of forking paths. Where you go depends on the path you choose. But you still need to follow one of the available paths. 

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Now, let me try to examine Michaux's work and Ahmed's rebuttal in light of these considerations. I went through Michaux's report, and I can tell you that it is well done, accurate, full of data, and created by competent professionals. That doesn't mean it cannot be wrong, just like the peak oil date was proposed by competent professionals but turned out to be wrong. The problem is evident from the beginning: it is right there, in the title. 

Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels 

You see? Michaux assumes from the start that we need "extra capacity" from "alternative" energy in order to "completely replace" fossil fuels. If the problem is stated in these terms, the answer to the question of the feasibility of the transition can only be negative. 

Alas, we didn't need a report of 985 pages to understand that. It was obvious from the beginning. The limits of mineral resources were already shown in 1972 by the authors of "The Limits to Growth," the report sponsored by the Club of Rome. We know that we have limits; the problem is which paths we can choose within these limits. 

This question is often touched on in Michaux's report when he mentions the need to "think outside the box" and to change the structure of the system. But, eventually, the result is still stated in negative terms. It is clear from the summary, where Michaux says, "The existing renewable energy sectors and the EV technology systems are merely steppingstones to something else, rather than the final solution." This suggests that we should stick to fossil fuels while waiting for some miracle leading us to the "final" solution, whatever that means. This statement can be used to argue that renewables are useless. Then, it becomes a memetic weapon to keep us stuck to fossil fuels; an attitude which can only lead us to disaster. 

Nafeez Ahmed perfectly understood the problems in his rebuttal. Ahmed notes several critical points in Michaud's report; the principal ones are underestimating the current EROI of renewables and the recent developments of batteries. That leads him to the statement that renewables are not really "renewable" but, at most, "replaceable." Which is simply wrong. The EROI of renewables is now large enough to allow the use of renewable energy to recycle renewable plants. Renewables are exactly that: renewable. 

You could argue that my (and Ahmed's) evaluation of the EROI of renewables is over-optimistic. Maybe, but that's not the main point. Ahmed's criticism is focused on the roots of the problem: we need to take into account how the system can (and always does) adapt to scarcity. It follows different paths among the many available. Ahmed writes: 

...we remain trapped within the prevailing ideological paradigm associated with modern industrial civilisation. This paradigm is a form of reductive-materialism that defines human nature, the natural world, and the relationship between them through the lens of homo economicus – a reduction of human nature to base imperatives oriented around endless consumption and production of materially-defined pursuits; pursuits which are premised on an understanding of nature as little more than a repository of material resources suitable only for human domination and material self-maximisation; in which both human and nature are projected as separate and competing, themselves comprised of separate and competing units.

Yet this ideology is bound up with a system that is hurtling toward self-destruction. As an empirical test of accuracy, it has utterly failed: it is not true because it clearly does not reflect the reality of human nature and the natural world.

It’s understandable, then, that in reacting to this ideology, many environmentalists have zeroed in on certain features of the current system – its predatory growth trajectory – and sought out alternatives that would seem to be diametrically opposed to those regressive features.

One result of this is a proliferation of narratives claiming that the clean energy transformation is little more than an extension of the same industrialised, endless growth ideological paradigm that led us to this global crisis in the first place. Instead of solving that crisis, they claim, it will only worsen it.

Within this worldview, replacing the existing fossil fuel energy infrastructure with a new one based on renewable energy technologies is a fantasy, and therefore the world is heading for an unavoidable contraction that will result in the demise of modern civilisation.  ... Far from being a sober, scientific perspective, this view is itself an ideological reaction that represents a ‘fight or flight’ response to the current crisis convergence. In fact, the proponents of this view are often as dogmatically committed to their views as those they criticise. ....

Recognising the flaws in Michaux’s approach does not vindicate the idea that the current structures and value-systems of the global economy should simply stay the same. On the contrary, accelerating the energy and transport disruptions entails fundamental changes not only within these sectors, but in the way they are organised and managed in relation to wider society.

My critique of Michaux doesn’t justify complacency about metals and minerals requirements for the clean energy transformation. Resource bottlenecks can happen for a range of reasons as geopolitical crises like Russia's war in Ukraine make obvious. But there are no good reasons to believe that potential materials bottlenecks entail the total infeasibility of the transition.

... we face the unprecedented opportunity and ecological necessity to move into a new system. This system includes the possibilities of abundant clean energy and transport with diminishing material throughput, requiring new circular economy approaches rooted in respect for life and the earth; and where the key technologies are so networked and decentralised that they work best with participatory models of distribution and sharing. This entails the emergence of a new economy with value measured in innovative ways, because traditional GDP metrics focusing on ever-increasing material throughput will become functionally useless.

If you can, please, try to examine these statements by Ahmed with an open mind because he perfectly frames the problem. And never forget one thing: the future is not a single path toward catastrophe. It is a garden of forking paths. We are bound to follow one of these paths: we don't know which one yet, but not all of them lead to the Seneca Cliff. In the transition to a renewable energy system, we can adapt, reduce demand, improve efficiency, deploy new technologies, and simply be happy with a more limited supply of energy at some moments. It is only the rigidity of our mental models that make us think that there are no alternatives to fossil fuels. 

Setting the record straight on the EROI from renewables. It is much better than that of fossil fuels

From a recent paper by Murphy et al. 

The analysis performed herein represents a much-needed update and harmonization of the EROI literature, and it advances the conversation surrounding the viability of renewable resources in the energy transition process. A common argument is that the EROIs from renewable energy technologies are supposedly lower than those provided by fossil fuels, and that transitioning to RE technologies would therefore result in a large loss in net energy. The results of this analysis rebuke that sentiment, noting that the three most important technologies for the energy transition—wind, PV, and hydropower—all have EROIs at or above 10 (even when the output is weighted in terms of primary energy equivalent assuming a future-proof life-cycle grid efficiency of ηG = 0.7, i.e., 1 unit of electricity per 1.4 units of primary energy). This means that more than 90% of the energy produced by these technologies is delivered to society as net energy. 

Perhaps more interesting still, the EROIs from liquid fuels, including the EROI from conventional oil production, are less than 10 once the costs of refining and delivery to the point-of-use are included. Oil is widely considered the most important fuel for the economy, used mostly in the transportation sector. This means that oil delivers less net energy to society for each unit invested in extraction, refining, and delivery than PV or wind. The transition to electric vehicles, according to these results, will actually increase the amount of net energy delivered to society (even more so when considering the higher efficiency of electrical power trains vs. internal combustion engines). 

It is clear from these results that EROI estimates at the point of extraction can be wildly misleading. As a case in point, even if crude oil were measured to have an EROI of 1000 or more at the point of extraction, the corresponding EROI at the point of use, using global average data for the energy “cost” of the process chain, would still only be a maximum of 8.7. Furthermore, as the quality of oil, gas and coal continue to decline in the future, the energy “cost” of the associated process chains will increase, further reducing the EROIs. On the other hand, as the technologies used to harness renewable energy improve, the corresponding EROIs will continue to increase in the future.

A new Revolution in China!

 

Unnoticed, unreported, sometimes despised, the renewable revolution is coming. And, soon, it will be unstoppable. China is leading the way. 

From Taiyang news

"While the capacity it would bring online is not clear, one can safely assume it would be somewhere in the higher double digit or even 3 digit GW level. It would be a great help for the country as it makes efforts to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060"

Humankind's Tragic Mistake: How we Blew our Chances of Survival

 

A chronicle of how our civilization (if we want to call it in this way) blew its chance of survival. If we had invested in what really mattered, energy, we could have made it. But we preferred to invest in the toys we like so much: military hardware. And think that these 6 trillion dollars of hardware were used to make sure that some foreigners would send us the energy the US needed. With the same money, we could have had the same amount of energy produced at home. So much money thrown away, and that doesn't count the damage done on the receiving end. And now we are throwing away another good chunk of our remaining resources to follow the impossible hydrogen dream

 

An amazing article by Paul Gipe.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/12/19/beating-swords-into-plowshares-or-wind-turbines-solar-panels-we-could-have-done-it/

 

 

We Could Have 100% Renewable Electricity If We Had Invested in Wind and Solar Instead of War in the Middle East

Yes, the United States could be generating 100% of its electricity from renewable energy if we had used the money spent on our ill-advised wars in the Middle East to build wind and solar systems, as well as battery storage, here at home.

That’s the startling conclusion of a simple calculation my colleague Robert Freehling and I made after the latest reports on the economic cost of our wars in the Middle East.

This is, after all, not rocket science. Money spent on war–anywhere–is money lost. It’s not an investment in the future. It’s money quite literally that goes up in smoke.

In contrast, money spent on building wind and solar farms or putting solar systems on rooftops is money invested in the future that will be earning returns–in the form of electricity–for 20 to 30 years.

I’ve followed this topic since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I posted my first article on this subject on July 4, 2005, and I’ve been updating that article periodically since then as the cost of our wars continued to grow.

On the anniversary of September 11th this year, news articles on the cost of the war in Afghanistan prompted me to take another look at our lost opportunities to invest in infrastructure here at home for the direct benefit of Americans.

What I learned shocked me. Using what I call a back-of-the-envelope method, I calculated that we could have installed enough wind turbines to more than provide 100% of our electricity with what we’d spent on war.

That just didn’t seem right. These are big numbers and it’s easy to get them wrong. After all, we’ve been told for decades that it’s simply too expensive to install that many wind turbines and solar panels. We could never afford it, critics warned.

So I called my colleague and renewable energy analyst Robert Freehling for help. I’ve relied on Freehling to sort out such thorny problems in the past.

His conclusion? Yes, we could be generating 100% of our electricity in this country from just wind and solar; that is, not counting existing hydro, geothermal, or biomass generation. Freehling, though, goes even further. We would be generating so much renewable electricity that we could store huge amounts in batteries–electricity storage that also would be paid for with our “war savings.”

How did we reach such a conclusion? Did we use a supercomputer to calculate all the possible permutations of what a renewable electricity supply would look like?

No. We kept it simple. We looked at two respected estimates of what our wars have cost in economic terms to the US taxpayer, not what they’ve cost in human suffering, nor what they’ve cost the countries on the receiving end of our expenditures.

The National Priorities Project calculates that the wars in the Middle East since 2001 have cost $4.9 trillion, a sum that continues to rise. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates $5.9 trillion through Fiscal Year 2019. Their latest estimate raises that to $6.4 trillion through FY 2020.

To paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen, “A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon it adds up to real money.” For a sense of perspective, one billion is 1,000 million. Thus, a trillion is one million million. That’s a one with twelve zeros behind it–a very big number.

We made no attempt to match the annual costs of the wars to the deployment of wind and solar. Again, we kept it simple. We simply prorated the costs over two decades with the exception explained below.

Freehling’s simple spreadsheet model assumes ramping up installations from a low base over a decade to reflect the necessity of scaling up manufacturing to meet the demand. Then he held installations constant for another decade until he reached 100% renewable generation from wind and solar. If we had started in 2001, the whole conversion would be accomplished by 2020.

Shockingly, there was a lot of money left over. So Freehling plowed the remainder into battery storage using the same approach as with wind and solar. He scaled installations up from a low base until the industry was likely to reach maturity.

Existing renewable generation from hydro, geothermal, and biomass was then shunted into the mass of new storage. Batteries would be used to equalize the grid when winds were light or the sun had set. The remainder could then be used to charge electric vehicles.

Wind and solar are cheap today. That was not so, two decades ago. Freehling accounts for this by using historical figures for the cost of wind and solar.

He dropped the initial cost of wind from $2,500 per kilowatt of installed capacity in the year 2000 to about $1,400 today.

Solar has seen a dramatic drop in cost during the past two decades. Freehling used $12,000 per kilowatt as the cost of solar capacity in 2000 and dropped it to nearly $1,500 per kilowatt in 2020.

We apportioned how much wind and how much solar were built, based on the work of my French colleague Bernard Chabot. He found that for a temperate climate, such as the United States, the optimum mix of generation is 60% wind and 40% solar energy. This mix minimizes the amount of storage needed.

Batteries are still expensive. The cost of battery storage, however, has fallen 80% in the past decade alone notes Freehling. He suggests that the cost of battery storage would have fallen even more rapidly through economies-of-scale if we had begun deploying them at scale sooner. Batteries for Electric Vehicles (EVs) would also be cheaper today if we had plowed some of our war savings into battery development.

Here in California, the Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) requires 4-hours of storage for it to reliably meet peak demand.” Our scenario calls for one million megawatts of wind and another one million megawatts of solar. This scenario uses some 700,000 MW of batteries to store 3 terawatt-hours (TWh) or 3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. The amount of storage is approximately enough to meet the peak electricity demand for the entire United States for a period of 4 hours.

All together, wind, solar, and storage would be capable of providing 4,400 TWh per year–the amount of electricity generated annually in the United States–for an investment of $6 trillion over two decades.

The United States produces more than 700 TWh per year–about 17% of annual electricity generation–from existing wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass. Existing renewables would be capable of powering more than one-third to as much as one-half of the entire US passenger vehicle fleet with electricity.

If we had instead invested the $6 trillion we squandered on war in the Middle East, we would, two decades later, have made our grid more resilient with battery storage, and be generating 100% of our electricity with wind and solar. Moreover, existing sources of renewable energy would be sufficient to power a substantial portion of our passenger cars with clean, renewable electricity.

Incredible.

What a lost opportunity.
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Paul Gipe is a renewable energy analyst and the author of Wind Energy for the Rest of Us. He has worked with wind energy for the past four decades.

• United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion

• Cost of National Security, National Priorities Project

• Watson Institute of Public Affairs, Brown University, Economic Costs of War

• Beating Swords into Wind Turbines–or Solar Panels if You Like, December 29, 2007. This op-ed was originally posted on July 4, 2005 and then appeared at Renewable Energy Access.com (Now RenewableEnergyWorld.com) on July 11, 2005. This version has been updated with current figures for the cost of the war and estimates of its total direct and indirect costs (to the USA only).

 

 

 

 

The New Paradigm of Renewables: if we want something to change, we need to change something

 

We can make it: the latest results of the analysis of the performance of renewable energy, photovoltaic and wind, show that their efficiency in terms of energy return on investment (EROI) is considerably larger than that of fossil fuels. It is becoming clear, too, that renewables don't need rare and disappearing mineral resources: the infrastructure to build them and maintain them needs only abundant and recyclable minerals: silicon, aluminum, and a few more that can be efficiently recycled (rare earths and lithium). 

In other words, renewables can't be considered anymore as an emergency replacement for the depleting and polluting fossil fuels, but as a true step forward. They are the new, "disruptive" technology that people expected nuclear energy to be, but that never was.  

Tony Seba -- sharp as always -- has diffused the idea of renewables as the new energy revolution. Seba's ideas have been popularized by Nafeez Ahmed in a two parts series, (Part 1 and Part2). These assessments may be too optimistic in some regards, but they do note how things are changing. We have a chance, a fighting chance, to falsify the scenarios that saw an irreversible decline -- actually a collapse -- of the industrial civilization during the next few decades. 

Can we really make it? It is a chance, but not a certainty. The quantitative calculations made by Sgouridis, Csala, and myself indicate that we can only succeed if we invest in renewables much more than what we are investing nowadays. If we maintain the current trends, renewables will be able to slow down the decline, but not avoid a "dip" in the civilization curve. Then, we will re-emerge on the other side in a new and cleaner world. But we might not be able to avoid total collapse if we don't keep investing a significant fraction of the available resources in the transition.

Unfortunately, this idea faces stiff opposition from various industrial lobbies, and especially from a diehard section of environmentalism that remains stuck to ideas that have been shown several times to be ineffective: exhortations for good behavior, individual energy saving, carbon taxes, and the like. All these things have been proposed for decades and failed to make a dent in the predominance of fossil fuels and the emissions of greenhouse gases. In part, the opposition takes the form of wasting resources for technologies that are known to be inefficient (carbon sequestration) or useless (hydrogen), or both things at the same time. We need to do better than that. We need something different. 

If we want something to change, we need to change something. 

We can make it!!