This story has been edited to make it clearer that the analysis relates to US wind rather than European wind and to clarify the problem with excess generation at night. I also added an Item 10.

I think we think we know more about wind-power than we do. These are a few things that I have recently discovered about wind that make me think that plunging headlong into electricity is not necessarily a good idea. At this point, we don't seem to have a plan that does much more than address wind turbines themselves.

I should make it clear that this discussion relates to US wind power, not European wind power. Many of the issues directly or indirectly relate to the fact the US is facing a multi-faceted problem--lack of wind turbines, needed grid upgrades, and lack of electrical storage. In a time of financial problems, the price of such a big change makes it difficult to tackle all these problems on the necessary scale at once. If we only add wind turbines, and make minimal upgrades in storage and transmission, the change is still likely to still be expensive and will likely leave us with the need for large subsidies. Without extensive grid upgrades and electrical storage changes, wind generated electricity will continue to play only a supporting role, acting mostly as a fuel substitute.

Europe has been dealing with this issue longer and has better addressed the wind transmission and storage issue, so it is in better shape in this regard. Jerome Guillet has prepared a write-up focusing more on the European perspective.

In August 2007, a post titled Extracting Heavy Oil: Using Toe to Heel Air Injection (THAI) introduced readers of The Oil Drum to a technology for producing an upgraded extra-heavy oil from Alberta Tar Sands without the environmentally messy and energy-intensive surface mining procedures that currently dominate extraction. The post provided a first-look at producing and partially upgrading Alberta bitumen in situ. In this post we make preliminary estimates of the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of the THAI process.

The Alberta Tar Sands continued to garner interest through the first half of 2008 because of declining conventional oil production in Canada, the apparent success of the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) process and the increasing price of crude oil. Today they are still of interest as the countries of North America (and around the world) desire cheap, abundant crude oil from politically stable regions (See Unconventional Oil: Tar Sands and Shale Oil - EROI on the Web, Part 3 of 6). However the subsequent financial collapse during the second half of 2008 has caused many tar sand projects to be deferred. In fact, Canada's oil-sands industry has hit the skids, spreading a deepening gloom over Alberta's economy, and to some degree, across the country. Some expansion projects that were under way in the Fort McMurray region have been put on the shelf, as oil companies slash their budgets to reflect the new economic environment in which they operate – that is – a world of lower oil demand and, at least compared to the summer of 2008, low oil prices.

The following is a post by both Dr. Charles Hall and EROI Guy. Most of the material comes from a recently published book chapter titled “Peak oil, EROI, investments and the economy in an uncertain future.” The book can be found here. Dr. Charles Hall is a professor of Systems Ecology at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, and has written about energy issues many times on The Oil Drum, found here.

Editor's note: the following post is by Dr. Charles Hall and his Phd student David Murphy (EROI Guy), and is part of our on-going series reviewing the World Energy Outlook 2008, recently published by the IEA. It is also the first post of a new 'channel' on The Oil Drum: TOD:EROI, where we will be posting essays, papers, and analysis on the biophysical aspects of energy. Our intent is to be a real time central clearinghouse for biophysical/net energy research and ideas. We have debated on calling it EROEI - Energy Return on Energy Invested, but have decided to keep it consistent with the acronym from the energy literature. The post below critiques the neoclassical economic assumptions underpinning the IEA report and proposes future 'energy watchdog' reports utilize an alternative approach grounded in biophysical concepts.