IP - I am posting Professor Clevelands response to "Practical" up here, because Practicals prominent post merits a prominent response- sorry for the gauche blog behavior

"At the moment no business decisions are made on the basis of net energy or EROEI."

Who ever said day-day business decisions are or should be made according to net energy criteria? No one I know of. EROI is a long run force that has shaped every major technological, economic, social, and environmental transformation we have gone through, and most certainly will drive the next one. It sets broad but immutable constraints on what is and is not possible. Investment undoubtedly will be driven to sources with the higher net energy gain, unless non-market forces interfere, because free market systems probaly try to mazimize power see (H.T. Odum).

"If they were, we would have to shut down the electric utility industry for sure and probably most of the industrial economy"

Did you read and understand the section on enegy quality? We trade 3 BTUs of low quality (coal) for 1 BTU of high quality energy (electricity) because that 1 BTU can do more economic work-produce more GDP-than those 3 BTUS of input fuel. An appropriately done EROI of a utlity reflects this reality.

1) You've neglected the cost for new (non-waste)silicon, additional storage, transmission lines, maintenence and labor of pv systems. The boundries for eroei analysis are greater than those for energy efficiency studies

2)Your analogy is lacking. Cotton candy is light and contains little caloric content but is full of embodied energy. She spinning machine and labor use a lot of energy

IP

I agree that an article should ultimately be judged by the quality of the data and argument, but when did good writing become a character flaw? Most scientific writing suffers from a terrible form of prose that follws the following sentence structure ad nauseum: preposition...preposistion...linking verb...preposition...preposition.

E.g.

The cost OF installation OF solar panels WITH the new technology invented BY our company IS less than the cost OF operating the older system WITH the inefficiencies inherit In the system.

or

The effect OF the medication ON systolic blood pressure IN the experimental group WAS greater than the effect ON the placebo group IN this study.

This latter sentence could be rendered:

The medication effectively reduced the experimental group's systolic blood pressure more than the placebo group's.

By avoiding all the prepositions and allowing an action verb to create some of the sentence's meaning, the point is made more clearly and is easier to read.

If you read a lot of scientific writing, like I do, pay attention as you read. You'll become aware of how repetitive and redundant this lazy form of writing is and how it detracts from the writing and makes the point less clear. And then you'll realise how refreshing it is to read something like Mr. Cleveland's essay.

Oh, and yes, the "repetitive and redundant" phrase was intentional.

ET,

Could you give the details of the PV costs you found, so that I can reconcile them with the estimates I've seen?

If you could, I'd appreciate: total cost; installation cost; peak rated capacity; and projected # of kwhr's. I believe you used an interest rate of 6%.

A few thoughts: your rate of 8 cents is cheaper than average, and is much less than the actual cost of providing the peak power that solar provides: the fact that your power rates are averaged over the whole day subsidizes peak electrical consumption. Average cost in the US is about 10 cents, and peak power ranges very, very roughly from 15 to 35 cents.

Pumped storage is an old, proven and cost-effective method of storing electricity, not a vague hand waving kind of thing. It hasn't been used more because nat gas peaker plants have been so cheap. Nevertheless, there are many existing examples such as the Luddington MI installation that was paired with nuclear roughly 30 years ago, and is still in use. AlanFBE gives cost figures that amount to less than 1 penny per kwh stored, and of course only a fraction of the energy would require storage.

Even at 40cents/kWh you have a viable energy source. Once the oil wells are dry, you can't say that for oil. The argument "But it's too expensive!" does not hold much water on that background. Neither does it do much for you in comparison with nuclear, unless your county puts up a sign "Please build the next nuclear power plant HERE!".

"An additional point to note in this kind of amortization cost is that one is paying for this electricity whether or not one is using it."

Since your solar panels are connected to the grid, any energy you aren't using is being used by someone else. They happen to be paying for it.

"For large-scale centralized PV power generation, seldom have I seen a realistic assessment of the grid-penetration/storage problems."

There is no storage problem as long as you don't have to shut down ALL your other power plants, which won't happen for at least another 30-40 years in case of solar energy. You simply have net savings in coal/natural gas. I bet with you that ten years down the road you would love to have more cheap NG in winter to heat your living room! You will ask yourself... why, oh, why did we have to waste 60% of the BTUs in NG in our electrical plants? Couldn't we have put some more wind turbines and solar panels up back in the days when there still was NG?

And as for the power grid... I am already paying for the grid on my current electricity bill. It is a fraction of generation cost. With stronger grids that cost will go up. Is that a problem? The grid argument falls into the category... "But it is too expensive!".

"Clearly, to me at least, unrealistic numbers are being used to make PV look better than it really is."

You can discuss that with the 10+ billion dollar industry that is growing at 30% per year. I am sure all these people are just wasting their time. They will thank you for your advice not to invest in the world's next great growth industry.

"Many ideas considered do indeed contain great promise."

For investors in porking plans like Syntec, you mean? I am sure you are right about that. I just don't believe there are any promises in them for honest people who have to pay for the scam with their tax dollars.

For example, take your EROEI analysis of coal to electricity. You conveniently didn't include the coal burned to spin the turbines in your EROEI calculation, only the energy burned mining the coal.

Excuse me? Exactly what is the 67% wasted heat in the example I just gave? The loss of burning coal for electricity generation. That's "conversion efficiency". It's included explicitly.

EROI certainly has problems, but tell me that the market doesnt! Id rather make long term decisions based on energy than based on dollars. The dollars will follow (or something of value will)

One of the things Im devoting my time and resources is to standardize and EROI methodology that can actually be used by policy makers to use our few bullets to their best advantage of turning fossil fuels into renewable infrastructure. The national scaling of corn ethanol MIGHT turn out if we have a cellulosic breakthrough but the ONLY reason its being scaled is due to subsidies and the money that people can make (from our taxes essentially). EROI aint perfect, but its looking a step down the road.