172 comments on Efficiency Policy, Jevon’s Paradox, and the “Shadow” Rebound Effect
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k Nation (Jim Kunstler)
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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.