@knud I don't know what your metrics and projections are based off of, and it's irrelevant. You're looking at it, perhaps from the POV of the people using the energy. I'm thinking about the people who are being exploited to get the raw material for said energy, the ecosystems they're coming from, and the actual capacity of the planet. Your orientation requires more, mine less.
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Then they need more fuel. Fuel that will displace people (coal), or impact their immediate (fracking) or wider (extreme weather) environment. Producing this energy with renewables removes this "more".
By now solar panels and batteries can be 100% recycled. Sodium batteries use little exotic materials, etc.
So my point is not one of "more" but of "instead". And that implies installing solar and wind harvesting, and shutting down burning facilities.
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@knud I think you are well-intentioned, but we're looking at this differently. I do not think that the renewable/green technology production cycle is sustainable. The amount of damage done to ecosystems to get the materials, to say nothing of the costs to human health, needs to be taken into account with these assessments. At the very least, you can move people around only after you've damaged the places they live only so many times before you run out of places to move them. @gerrymcgovern
I have literally no idea what you are talking about.
The only alternative to producing energy via solar and wind is fossil. Do you want that?
@knud I’m in agreement with “we need a combination of both” (https://mastodon.social/@knud/116540906047307330) but…
The greater metals dependency per GW generated will matter more than we think. The *dependency* of renewables on fossil infrastructure and inputs for manufacture will matter more than we think.
The dishonesty of how they’re described and thus what they’re understood to be is part of the picture of why power consumption grows and why demand reduction is not part of policy
@knud nevertheless, I don’t think we are strategically in control of what we’re doing and the incentives pretty much ensure that we are not capable of becoming so.
Oil and gas will become radically less affordable in the coming years and the lived experience of being on the enforced downslope of power consumption will help us forge new ways of being
@urlyman Maybe. But from what I've seen, normal price signals aren't enough. @knud @gerrymcgovern
@dnkboston hence my use of the word “enforced”. The lived experience of relative absence will drive change. And perhaps, out of a deficit of technological ubiquity will come a reconnection with forms of abundance that have always been there and still are, just
@urlyman Policy=enforcement? @knud @gerrymcgovern
@dnkboston no, that’s not where I’m coming from. Unavailability, intermittency.
When oil becomes unprofitable it becomes less extracted. As it becomes less profitable the cost of capital heads sharply up. As do all of oil’s supply chain dependents, including metals, many of which are independently heading along similar trajectories https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111374066310651684
@urlyman I keep thinking about something Charles Mann wrote a decade ago. There's never been Peak Oil, thanks to the determination of governments and oil companies to keep it flowing, which fostered "innovative" tech to do so.
I don't think oil will become difficult enough to extract in my lifetime.
@dnkboston
I've been listening to some talks on the subject and talking to some experts, and there are definite signs that we have peaked and that oil and gas will become more and more expensive, with all the implications that has for food, industry, etc.
@gerrymcgovern Because of Hormuz? Or even without that? @urlyman @knud
@dnkboston perhaps accelerated by (too hard to see) but for sure without it anyway.
The energy return on investment (EROI) of a barrel of oil around 1940 was 1:100. i.e. You got 100 barrels out for every 1 you invest in extraction. Today (pre 28 Feb), the global average is about 1:15. Joseph Tainter thinks that it becomes unsustainable at about 1:10 because of the upfront costs of exploration and field development.
That said, the field to field EROI variance is large. So…
@urlyman @dnkboston @gerrymcgovern @knud maybe you know this already but renewables have a higher EROEI when you look at the point of use instead of the point of extraction (for fossil fuels - renewables obvs don’t have a point of extraction)! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01518-6
@Brendanjones
How do you mean "renewables obvs don’t have a point of extraction"?
@gerrymcgovern I'm guessing @Brendanjones means that if you use solar or wind, the "extraction" on the panels or via turbines is a different kettle of fish than getting oil or coal. @urlyman @knud
@dnkboston @gerrymcgovern @urlyman @knud Indeed. For renewables there’s no fuel extracted for which you can measure eroi. Their fuel is the sun and the wind, which we didn’t create, so eroi is meaningless. For renewables you can only measure eroi at point of use or at the use phase.
Using the point of extraction eroi for fossil fuels vs point of use eroi for renewables is highly misleading, and playing into the narrative of the necessity of ff’s when ff’s are actually massively inefficient.
@Brendanjones
Extraction occurs in other ways. Wind turbines can need 120,000 tons of steel, 5,000 tons of nickel, 1,500 tons of copper, and nearly 300 tons of rare earth elements per GW of installed capacity.
But the real damage is in the mining waste. To get 1,500 of copper you can cause over 800,000 of toxic mining waste. To get 300 tons of rare earths, can cause about 600,000 ton of often radioactive waste. Wind and solar have intense upfront metal needs.
@gerrymcgovern @Brendanjones @dnkboston @urlyman
You still sound like you want to continue burning fossil fuels.
@knud
Not at all. But what I discovered after doing years of intense research on this and talking to loads of scientists, is that we never do a true and total environmental accounting when new technologies arrive. We focus on one problem, such as CO2--which is a critical problem. But we tend to ignore all the other harms, such as soil loss, biodiversity loss, etc.
Growth is killing us. It's what we're doing with the energy that is causing the greatest harms.
@gerrymcgovern @dnkboston @urlyman @knud Yes indeed, no disagreement here that eroi shouldn’t be the only measure looked at when comparing energy sources. I was simply making a comment about the narrative of the eroi of oil vs renewables, which is often used as an argument that oil is superior because of its energy density. Yes it’s more energy dense, but that doesn’t translate into more energy once it’s been converted to electricity, because the conversion process is so inefficient.
@Brendanjones
Interesting. How does energy 'efficiency' of oil compare to solar and wind?
Another thing someone explained to me recently. The majority of the toxicity of fossil fuels occurs at combustion, whereas wind and solar do most of their damage in the mining and consequent waste. We rarely account for the toxic waste and its environmental damage in calculating energy impacts. We are fast approaching mining a Mt Everest of waste every year.
@gerrymcgovern @dnkboston @urlyman @knud To add to what Jonathan already replied, this one’s a good read on the topic https://medium.com/@jan.rosenow/have-we-been-duped-by-the-primary-energy-fallacy-167f53c58961
@gerrymcgovern @Brendanjones @dnkboston @knud
Tadeusz Patzek characterises the fossil-fuelled era as wasting 60 to 70% of energy input before it even makes it to direct primary power output.
My understanding is that electricity is close to 100% efficient when generation is proximate to end use but because most generation is large scale and distant from end use *a lot* gets lost in distribution. (Which is itself a stupidly fragile and inefficient way to go about electrifying)…
@urlyman @gerrymcgovern @Brendanjones @dnkboston @knud
If I remember my undergraduate thermodynamics correctly, efficiencies when you burn stuff to create kinetic energy are not even close to 100%. Things get better if you run combined hear and power (for the parts of the year where the heat is useful), but whatever you do there is waste heat. Lots of waste heat.
@KimSJ @gerrymcgovern @Brendanjones @dnkboston @knud
Yes. My ‘close to 100%’ was assuming proximate transmission from a wind or solar source with low transformer stepping, and which has conveniently set aside the emissions used to build it in a cumulative emissions predicament.
Just as I have conveniently set aside the emissions of the handheld computer I’m tapping this on
@urlyman @gerrymcgovern @Brendanjones @dnkboston @knud
Of course both wind and solar have their own inefficiencies too, but ‘wasting’ wind or sunshine is not really an issue, except when it comes to how many resources (steel, rare earths, etc) are needed to build a given capacity.
Solar panels typically only use around 20% of the light falling on them, though this number is climbing towards double that with current research.
@gerrymcgovern @Brendanjones @dnkboston @knud
…The rule of thumb I’ve seen is that the overall efficiency of electrification is expected to reduce like-for-like demand by 40%.
But the narrative misses the point that the infrastructure doesn’t get built without the extant fossil fuel infrastructure to build it.
People like Louis Arnoux make more sense to me in that they make a case for hyperlocal small-scale generation with tech that has substantially less advanced industrial dependencies
@urlyman My 17 year old heart pitter pattered when I first read about microgrids--and then thirty years later, was told that MA regulations forbid them.
Regardless of energy/heat source, efficient power/transmission lines, as well as optimal insulation, makes it possible to use less energy.
@gerrymcgovern @Brendanjones @dnkboston @knud
…Arnoux is rather protective of the details but the principles of what he says seem right to me.
Which I would sum up as build for the intermittency of the downslope, not the expectations of an upslope (or even a plateau) that won’t be there
@dnkboston What happens is degrees of intermittency. Which accelerates the decline of the whole system.
The paradox is that as oil price goes up that can prop up the viability of extraction in given fields but it doesn’t change that the overall supply of a non-renewable resource chaotically declines
@dnkboston There are strong signs that what has been thought of as ‘conventional oil’ peaked in 2018. And that the grades of it which support diesel as a direct derivative may have peaked around 2015. And diesel is what does most of the hardest of hard work.
Refinery tech has become incredibly adept at masking this by recombining different oil fractions. But that too is more expensive than not having to do so when the input is of high enough quality…
@dnkboston Consequently, a lot of what is today termed ‘oil’ – in the interests of keeping the capital flowing that supports its extraction – is not what a mid 20th Century oil man would call oil at all.
And now the US admin is beginning to overtly expand the degree to which it obfuscates the true picture in its reporting
@urlyman Here's hoping we don't follow into the next toxic energy source @gerrymcgovern @knud
@dnkboston it will be differently toxic. Fundamentally because industrialism is not regenerative or metabolisable by life on human time scales.
Hence Tom Murphy characterising modernity as metastatic
@urlyman
Consumption is out of control, for sure, and we have found the easiest and cheapest oil, gas and metals. But if history is a teacher, then our civilizations will double down on the worst behaviors of the Growth Death Cult.
I can only see environmental and civilizational collapse coming. The question is: What comes after? How do we be good ancestors so that everything is not destroyed.
I agree. Manure will hit/is hitting the ventilator.
Overlooked in the various runs of The Limits to Growth (1972) book is the fact all scenarios have some kind of collapse or decline by 2100. And a reminder: World population in 1970 was estimated at ~ 3.6 billion. It has more than doubled since then, but the available resources have already suffered major depletion.
So...
there are ~ 9 billion people, fewer resources, climate degradation, and lots of stupid, greedy oligarchs.
Friends, this does not look like a good future. Expect extreme unpleasantness. Prepare accordingly.
Be flexible. Do not expect the future that you thought was possible, or that you were told was your "right." Technology will not save modern civilization, that point was passed decades ago.
Hedge your bets. Go listen to "The Gambler" and take its advice to heart.
Learn to let go.
@gerrymcgovern every tree does what it can to be a forest, and Luke Kemp’s ‘Goliath’s Curse’ shows that collapse is not unidirectional
