172 comments on Efficiency Policy, Jevon’s Paradox, and the “Shadow” Rebound Effect
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172 comments on Efficiency Policy, Jevon’s Paradox, and the “Shadow” Rebound Effect
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You only analyzed photovoltaics, which have the lowest EROEI of all the options. Among the flaws of your analysis:
Forget PV for a moment. If you can show serious problems with the proposition that a sustainable energy system is impossible in the USA (as an example), I'd like you to go over my "Sustainability" essay and show me exactly where I went wrong. Do note that I assumed a lot less liquid-fuel production than the maximum possible (I devoted about 2/3 of the carbon for sequestration), and even if technologies like the DCFC turn out to be duds there are backup paths which will yield a European-level energy consumption.
Let's suppose that I put a wind turbine on a 1/4 acre pad at the edge of a cornfield. This is a 126 meter diameter rotor, spaced 4 diameters on-center crosswind and 10 diameters downwind to the next machine. Total land area blanked by the turbine is 63.5 ha (157 acres). Total blade weight is ~54 tonnes, of which perhaps half is derived from resins (the other half is glass fiber). Assume fatigue lifetime of 20 years.
If 80% of that land is cropped in maize every other year at 150 bu/ac/yr grain and 2.5t/ac/yr stover, the land will produce 157 t/yr of stover. If the stover can be converted to e.g. bio-oil at 70% mass-efficiency and the bio-oil to resins at 20% efficiency, each year's stover can make 22 tons of resin. This compares favorably with the 27 tons of resin required to replace the rotor after 20 years (1.35 t/yr).
This is a recipe for rapidly increasing production (80%/year growth potential) from renewable supplies. It would be able to yield both food and energy with more than 90% of the non-food products (both energy and chemicals) available for other consumption. In short, it grows like a plant.
Even 14% efficiency from biomass to a resin product seems to be no obstacle to rapid growth. The key is that there is some efficiency level where the cost of renewable material and energy inputs stops being a limiting factor on system growth.
As for keeping up with declining production, let's assume a 2%/year compounded decline in fossil-fired electric generation (2005 figure: ~2000 billion kWh/year) and a 40%/year compounded increased in wind generation (14.6 billion kWh/year in 2005). The fossil-fired decline runs about 40 billion kWh/year/year, while the wind generation increases about 4 billion kWh/year in 2005, 8 billion kWh/year in 2007, and 32 billion kWh/year in 2011. The increase in wind exceeds the decline in fossil in 2012, and then it's uphill until the inflection point of the logistic curve is reached — perhaps another decade.
Annual wind energy potential from the continental 48 states is estimated at about 1.2 terawatts average (~10,000 billion kWh/year) from the continent, and about 900 gigawatts (~7500 billion kWh/year) from the continental shelves. This is sufficient to supply all current end-use energy consumption.
Please show me where those limits are in a renewable-energy scenario (don't forget to assume 25%-efficient PV at $1/watt within the next 20 years), and why they'd lead to a collapse instead of a "climax forest" scenario.
Ris·i·ble /ˈrɪzəbəl/ Pronunciation[riz-uh-buhl]
–adjective
1. causing or capable of causing laughter; laughable; ludicrous.
2. having the ability, disposition, or readiness to laugh.
3. pertaining to or connected with laughing.
4. cant of the orotund flatus
Who are you to decide how this planet puts to best 'effect' it's biomass? Sorry poet, but I find that sort of thinking the reason we are in this sorry state. We tear up the floor boards of our house in order to heat it.
When I said "the world", I meant the human portion thereof. If we're producing stalks, leaves, trimmings, slash, pulp and other material that we essentially throw away, we might as well change our methods to get the most out of them.
While the analysis in the link was aimed at PV, the relevant point here is that it lays out a methodology for calculating EROEI--a "price-estimated EROEI." I state quite clearly that it is an imperfect methodology, just one that I think is better than current methodologies, which ignore a huge percentage of energy inputs to a given product.
The truly laughable notion is your assertion that wind has an EROEI of 80:1. That's greater than any other form of electricity generation--If there is so much wind potential, I wonder why we don't rely primarily on wind in this country? How much do you have personally invested in wind developments?
The bottom line is that, even if we accept your wildly optimistic projections for wind and other renewable energy production, this does nothing to address the fact that we have an economy predicated upon continual growth situated on a finite planet. But advocating wind energy is where you want to place your effort, more power to you...
Beyoned energy returns of 40 or 50 it just doesn't matter. First your analysis becomes sensitive to rather small things so you can start fudging the numbers without really lying, so either hydro or nuclear or wind have the highest energy return depending on which day of the week it is.
Second, and this has been hammered home many times, energy return isn't the sole determinant of economic competitiveness of electricity generation. For example, if wind had twice or three times the energy payback it would still require quite a bit of excess capital for dealing with intermittency, from HVDC lines routing between different generating regions to pumped hydro storage.
Sure this is something we'll have to deal with... in several centuries. We aren't close to tapping out the energy potential of the solar flux or the radiative capacity of earth of roughly 10^16 watts. One might reasonably surmise that we'll address this by moving a substantial amount of our industry off planet by then.
If you can't tell me what's wrong with the source, what do you have to argue with? I admit that 80:1 is extreme, but other sources claim EROI of 17-39.
Why shouldn't it be? It's got zero energy expenditure per unit of "fuel".
Rural areas once did, until the REA brought grid power to most of the nation and destroyed the market for wind turbines. Note that the wind industry was put out of business by a government-subsidized competitor.
I don't know. Most of my money is in mutual funds, and I have no idea what their particular investments are.
Which means the oil situation (heck, everything about fossil fuels) is irrelevant to your thesis, so why do you bother to post on this site?
In closing, an analogy: An individual shark lives based on continual growth in a finite ocean. Sharks have been around for about 420 million years.