The late UK Chief Scientific Advisor Professor Sir David MacKay said the same thing in a different way many years ago via his online book “Sustainable energy - without the hot air”. He used simple engineering calculations to show the impossibility of powering a modern industrial economy with intermittent weather-dependent renewables but his advice was wilfully ignored by our political class. In hindsight it is obvious that way back then they were already collaborating to wreck our energy infrastructure on the pretext of "climate change" at the behest of their globalist overlords. https://www.withouthotair.com/.
Douglas - David’s book left a deep impression on me. He was highly motivated and solvent and even he couldn’t retrofit a postwar terrace house with enough insulation to get more than a 40% reduction in energy. He’s why I built a passive house.
His conclusion was that you’d need more surface area than Britain has to provide its energy needs. But he overlooked the fact that the devices were built with high gradient energy, so underestimated the number of Britains you’d need if you were also running the wind turbine and solar panel factories on wind turbine and solar panel electricity.
I recommend David's book to every person interested in energy/sustainability. Not many of them know it and it should be the start point for any future studies. Main issue for the public may be that David didn't clearly/explicitly state what should be obvious after reading with understanding. Modern, middle to high population density country cannot be powered by renewable sources. Areas and minerals needed, EROI, money, interconnections and time each of these by itself derails fantasy of renewable utopia. Not everyone reads with understanding or reads anything with numerical analysis at all.
This is exactly what everyone in the energy sector has being saying for decades. To meet our energy needs effectively there needs to be a blend of different technologies to optimise use of available resources. Policy needs to be tempered by common sense. It doesn't help that the advisory committees developing policy are dominated by equipment manufacturers each lobbying for advantage.
“It is assumed that ERoEI >5 to 7 is required for modern society to function. This marks the edge of The Net Energy Cliff and it is clear that new Green technologies designed to save humanity from CO2 may kill humanity through energy starvation instead. Fossil fuels remain comfortably away from the cliff edge but march closer to it for every year that passes”. https://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/.
Dave. Your essay on EROEI is excellent, and I particularly benefitted from your quantification.
A challenge that comes up when critiquing “renewable” energy is the reality-free argument that, as long as EROEI is greater than one - even fractionally - we can simply scale indefinitely. I get this even from university professors and holders of PhDs. They have no sense of what that translates into in terms of, say, the quantity of ore we’d have to process
I really enjoyed the way you explained this Mr Lyon. It was imaginative and made the concepts easy to grasp. It, 'the hardly boiled egg' from 'real time' power ( from the wind or the sun) shows why there is the unrelenting push for every home to have a Smart Meter by the end of 2025. Presumably you have forward your Article to the Desnez comedy outfit.
This is an excellent essay, Ed. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Of course, the chain goes much wider than that. The rivet in the panel of the vessel carrying the rare earth elements from the mine in Mongolia for the semiconductors in the computer that the wind turbine gearbox was designed on would be made from "renewable energy", as would the sandwich of the police officer ensuring the maintenance of law and order at the operating site (50% of the world's population depending on fossil fuel sourced fertiliser for food).
This article is a fantastic explanation of the physics and the futility of the arguments for green energy. However, something does need to be done to address the sustainability of our energy supply because one day the oil, gas and coal will run out. And I'd rather that the West had transitioned to a mixture of alternatives before that time. Maybe solar is only good enough for calculators and novelty garden lighting, but everything has its place and we do need to be smart.
There is clearly a lot of BS and greenwashing going on (don't get me started on carbon sequestration) but I don't think net zero is as dumb a target as you make out. It's more the fact that its proponents will do a bad job of it and apply the wrong methods to achieve it, with true energy sustainability suffering as a result.
I agree something needs to be done. We have large reserves of gas, but oil is depleting rapidly and substitution is hard. I'm not a nuclear expert but, unless it can be made to work at scale and transitioned to rapidly (setting aside the problem that much of the global industrial manufacturing system doesn't run on electricity and cannot be made to) we are in a very bad place.
This was such a fantastic essay. It taps into Robert Bryce and his iron law of energy density. The lower the density the higher the material input.
I’d seen. A ridiculous post about how with just 100m x 100mile solar panel in the desert you could power the world and your essay captures why that wouldn’t work. This was a back and forth response with ai worked through why I had
Sorry if it’s a bit long.
The 100-Mile Illusion: Why the Future Still Needs Fission and Gas
You’ve probably seen the claim, usually accompanied by a slick map and a hopeful caption:
“A 100-mile by 100-mile solar farm could power the entire United States.”
It’s tidy. It’s visual. It fits perfectly in a TED talk or on the wall of a high school science fair.
And it’s wildly misleading.
This post is about why that idea falls apart under first principles analysis—and what we might build instead if we genuinely care about energy abundance, environmental stewardship, and economic realism.
⸻
The Mirage of Solar Scale
Let’s start with the fantasy.
Could 10,000 square miles of solar panels generate the nameplate capacity to match U.S. electricity demand?
Possibly, on paper. But “nameplate” is a con.
Solar’s average capacity factor—how much energy it actually delivers over time—is just 20%. That means, for every 100 megawatts of solar panels, you get only about 20 megawatts of usable energy… and none of it dispatchable.
Sunlight doesn’t arrive on demand. It peaks at noon, fades by evening, disappears for months in winter, and plays hide and seek with clouds. A 100-mile solar farm might hit the headline wattage once a day—if you’re lucky.
⸻
System Costs Are the Real Costs
What the solar pitch forgets is this: electricity is not about generation alone. It’s about system reliability.
If you want a solar-powered grid, you need:
• Massive overbuilding of generation to account for low capacity factors
• Vast battery storage to shift supply across time
• Long-range transmission to shift power across geography
• Full dispatchable backup for seasonal lulls and cloudy weeks
Once you price in the full stack, the “cheap renewables” myth starts to collapse.
In cost model after cost model, wind with batteries emerged as the most expensive option over an 80-year lifespan.
Solar with batteries wasn’t far behind.
By contrast, gas came out cheapest. Nuclear was close behind—despite the regulatory straitjacket it’s currently forced to wear.
⸻
Nuclear: Constrained by Design
Nuclear should be our best option. It’s dense, clean, dispatchable, and scalable.
So why isn’t it?
Because we’ve regulated it into dysfunction.
Modern reactors are subject to shifting rules, endless reviews, and bureaucratic delays that span decades. The cost isn’t inherent to the technology—it’s an artifact of a system designed to make nuclear difficult.
But cracks are forming in that wall.
Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Energy, recently highlighted a subtle workaround. The U.S. Department of Energy used emergency executive authority to bypass years of permitting for diesel backup generators.
What if we applied that same logic to small modular reactors?
A simple policy shift—already proven—could unleash a new wave of safe, dispatchable, zero-carbon energy. No new laws. No Green New Deal. Just the political will to apply existing tools rationally.
⸻
The Role of Gas
Until nuclear is freed from its regulatory cage, natural gas remains the indispensable bridge.
It’s cheap, abundant, and highly responsive. It pairs well with intermittent renewables and fills the gap in ways batteries still can’t—economically or technically.
In a sane energy strategy, gas and nuclear work together:
• Gas stabilises the grid today
• Nuclear replaces it over time as baseload
• Renewables contribute where they can, without pretending they can do it all
⸻
Spain and the Cautionary Tale of Reality
When Spain’s grid collapsed recently—amid a premature pivot away from nuclear and an overreliance on solar—it didn’t take long for the excuses to emerge.
Too much renewables?
Not enough smart grid?
Or was the experiment flawed from the start?
What’s clear is this: no amount of ideology can override the laws of physics or the needs of a functioning society. Dispatchable energy isn’t optional. Reliability isn’t a luxury.
⸻
Conclusion: Build What Works
The 100-mile solar myth persists because it’s easy to believe. It’s beautiful, hopeful, and simple.
But energy is none of those things.
If we want a clean, reliable, affordable future, we need to:
• Be honest about costs
• Get serious about scale
• Unleash nuclear from regulatory purgatory
• Accept that gas will be part of the transition for decades
Wishful thinking has lit many a political campaign.
Richard, thank you so much for this brilliant article. It would be great if you could write something about the entropy of renewables compared to hydrocarbons and nuclear. Actually, this is what this article is about really. Your swimming pool already has relatively high entropy (like wind), so to increase the entropy and produce energy will be thermodynamically less efficient. I have a personal fascination with entropy, so I love your analogy of the swimming pool and saucepan of water. Do you have any good references/reading material on the entropy of renewables versus hydrocarbons/nuclear? For further reading? Keep up the great work. Cheers Adam
Adam - thank you in turn for taking the time to read the article, and for your kind comment and encouragement.
The entropy story around renewables is actually quite subtle. Sunlight, and electricity produced from it, being ordered, concentrated, and structured are in fact very low entropy sources. If there was some way of harnessing sunlight directly it would be an excellent energy source. Its enthusiasts forget (or are not aware) that the process of scavenging and converting it is so energy intensive that we end up with only 10 Watts of energy per square meter (1 Watt for wind) from it and that it is this property, not its entropy, that governs and limits the usefulness of these sources.
Hi Richard, thanks for the reply. Yes I can see that solar and wind, after having been gathered and concentrated, could be described as low entropy. But is not the change in entropy of a process, analogous to the energy gradient? I can see how burning a hydrocarbon or splitting an atom yields a large change in entropy and hense a steep energy gradient. Is not the change in entropy of solar or wind much less, hence much more energy needs to be put in to get useful energy out? Cheers Adam
Change in entropy in the conversion of sunlight into electricity is not merely analogous to a reduction in gradient - it is a reduction in gradient. The difference in temperature between the sun and the earth creates a (large) energy gradient. That energy gradient is largely destroyed when the panel splits that incoming energy into 80% high-entropy waste heat and 20% low-entropy electricity. The energy gradient is reduced again when that electricity is split into the 80% needed to make the panel (which is converted into high-entropy waste heat) and 20% to power civilisation. Despite the sun having high energy gradient and the electricity produced from it having low-entropy, the final energy gradient is too low to power an advanced civilisation.
An excellent article, succinctly put with some levity, but underlined by hard science fact. I shall circulate this widely as it sums up the scientific and engineering lunacy of net zero. A final comment; as we know net zero has nothing to do with the environment, but everything to do with collapsing efficient energy supply, controlling freedom of movement and society itself!
An excellent essay, Richard. I also like the work of Simon Michaux, of the Finnish Geological Survey, which explains why we won't be able to mine enough minerals to achieve the transition to electrified transport.
Andrew - it’s great to have you along for the ride. Thanks for reading my essay. I hope it provides a useful resource in your noble and much needed efforts.
This article on net zero is a little weird, but I think that it is saying this:
When you create a wind turbine, the energy required to manufacture and deploy the wind turbine is more than the energy extracted from the wind over the lifetime of the wind turbine.
Hello Nigel. It is a little weird. Thermodynamics is not particularly difficult, but its implications are not obvious in the context of renewable energy.
To your question. You are correct. But the point is not that they don’t return sufficient energy to cover their own manufacturing requirements. The point is that they don’t and will never provide energy of sufficient gradient to power an industrial society.
On reading a third time, I think I understand. To take a concrete example, if we want to build a wind farm in the North Sea out of the energy from the existing North Sea wind farms, the rate of growth of the North Sea wind farms would be very slow and during the build we could not take energy for other uses. We have only been able to build the North Sea farms so far because we have used energy from fossil or nuclear to manufacture the steel for the towers and gearboxes. Thanks Richard!
You've got it, Nigel. The purpose of an energy system is not to power the energy system's manufacturing system. Its purpose is to power us. Our energy system currently generates enough surplus after meeting its own manufacturing requirements to produce the fertiliser on which 4 billion depend for food. "Renewable energy" doesn't. So some large fraction of them would starve to death.
Can you think of any other energy transitions in human history from a dense fuel source to a diffuse fuel source? That hasn't resulted in a collapse, I mean? I can't.
Both nuclear and hydrocarbon are high gradient energy sources. The UK substituted high gradient nuclear with high gradient hydrocarbon. Not high gradient nuclear with low gradient wind/solar.
I observe that a transition from high density energy source to low density energy source has never been survived. Wood -> charcoal -> coal -> oil -> gas -> nuclear. Never the other way round.
I assert basic and, as far as we can tell, non-negotiable ecological principles re. net energy vs. carrying capacity.
Every one of those peer reviewed articles have been produced under conditions of, and assume as an a priori condition, an expanding net supply of energy. Their relevance to conditions of net energy contraction are, at best, unclear.
Brilliant article. So clearly demonstrates the fallacy that is Nut Zero. Mad Milliband is the most dangerous threat to our economy, even worse than Two Tier and Thieves
The late UK Chief Scientific Advisor Professor Sir David MacKay said the same thing in a different way many years ago via his online book “Sustainable energy - without the hot air”. He used simple engineering calculations to show the impossibility of powering a modern industrial economy with intermittent weather-dependent renewables but his advice was wilfully ignored by our political class. In hindsight it is obvious that way back then they were already collaborating to wreck our energy infrastructure on the pretext of "climate change" at the behest of their globalist overlords. https://www.withouthotair.com/.
It is so obvious that trying to run the country with net zero fossil fuels using replacements which have useless EROEI ratings (Energy Return on Energy Invested) will lead to economic collapse and mass starvation. https://davidturver.substack.com/p/why-eroei-matters?utm_source=publication-search.
Douglas - David’s book left a deep impression on me. He was highly motivated and solvent and even he couldn’t retrofit a postwar terrace house with enough insulation to get more than a 40% reduction in energy. He’s why I built a passive house.
His conclusion was that you’d need more surface area than Britain has to provide its energy needs. But he overlooked the fact that the devices were built with high gradient energy, so underestimated the number of Britains you’d need if you were also running the wind turbine and solar panel factories on wind turbine and solar panel electricity.
I recommend David's book to every person interested in energy/sustainability. Not many of them know it and it should be the start point for any future studies. Main issue for the public may be that David didn't clearly/explicitly state what should be obvious after reading with understanding. Modern, middle to high population density country cannot be powered by renewable sources. Areas and minerals needed, EROI, money, interconnections and time each of these by itself derails fantasy of renewable utopia. Not everyone reads with understanding or reads anything with numerical analysis at all.
This is exactly what everyone in the energy sector has being saying for decades. To meet our energy needs effectively there needs to be a blend of different technologies to optimise use of available resources. Policy needs to be tempered by common sense. It doesn't help that the advisory committees developing policy are dominated by equipment manufacturers each lobbying for advantage.
Carnot understood all this!
Here’s another lesson on ERoEI, by Euan Mearns. His Net Energy Cliff: https://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/netenerycliff3.png
“It is assumed that ERoEI >5 to 7 is required for modern society to function. This marks the edge of The Net Energy Cliff and it is clear that new Green technologies designed to save humanity from CO2 may kill humanity through energy starvation instead. Fossil fuels remain comfortably away from the cliff edge but march closer to it for every year that passes”. https://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/.
Another way of expressing energy gradient is EROEI. Here's a complimentary way of describing why it matters.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/why-eroei-matters
Dave. Your essay on EROEI is excellent, and I particularly benefitted from your quantification.
A challenge that comes up when critiquing “renewable” energy is the reality-free argument that, as long as EROEI is greater than one - even fractionally - we can simply scale indefinitely. I get this even from university professors and holders of PhDs. They have no sense of what that translates into in terms of, say, the quantity of ore we’d have to process
Schernikau and Smith are good on EROI, showing that wind and solar are parasitic on more efficient providers.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-the-energy-thieves
I really enjoyed the way you explained this Mr Lyon. It was imaginative and made the concepts easy to grasp. It, 'the hardly boiled egg' from 'real time' power ( from the wind or the sun) shows why there is the unrelenting push for every home to have a Smart Meter by the end of 2025. Presumably you have forward your Article to the Desnez comedy outfit.
Richard,
You've explained why the "Ultimate Demonstration" could not and therefore would not occur.
https://www.therightinsight.org/Ultimate-Demonstration
This is an excellent essay, Ed. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Of course, the chain goes much wider than that. The rivet in the panel of the vessel carrying the rare earth elements from the mine in Mongolia for the semiconductors in the computer that the wind turbine gearbox was designed on would be made from "renewable energy", as would the sandwich of the police officer ensuring the maintenance of law and order at the operating site (50% of the world's population depending on fossil fuel sourced fertiliser for food).
I was not trying to write "The Great American Novel". ;-)
Love it Richard. Hopefully it will be shared widely!
This article is a fantastic explanation of the physics and the futility of the arguments for green energy. However, something does need to be done to address the sustainability of our energy supply because one day the oil, gas and coal will run out. And I'd rather that the West had transitioned to a mixture of alternatives before that time. Maybe solar is only good enough for calculators and novelty garden lighting, but everything has its place and we do need to be smart.
There is clearly a lot of BS and greenwashing going on (don't get me started on carbon sequestration) but I don't think net zero is as dumb a target as you make out. It's more the fact that its proponents will do a bad job of it and apply the wrong methods to achieve it, with true energy sustainability suffering as a result.
I agree something needs to be done. We have large reserves of gas, but oil is depleting rapidly and substitution is hard. I'm not a nuclear expert but, unless it can be made to work at scale and transitioned to rapidly (setting aside the problem that much of the global industrial manufacturing system doesn't run on electricity and cannot be made to) we are in a very bad place.
This was such a fantastic essay. It taps into Robert Bryce and his iron law of energy density. The lower the density the higher the material input.
I’d seen. A ridiculous post about how with just 100m x 100mile solar panel in the desert you could power the world and your essay captures why that wouldn’t work. This was a back and forth response with ai worked through why I had
Sorry if it’s a bit long.
The 100-Mile Illusion: Why the Future Still Needs Fission and Gas
You’ve probably seen the claim, usually accompanied by a slick map and a hopeful caption:
“A 100-mile by 100-mile solar farm could power the entire United States.”
It’s tidy. It’s visual. It fits perfectly in a TED talk or on the wall of a high school science fair.
And it’s wildly misleading.
This post is about why that idea falls apart under first principles analysis—and what we might build instead if we genuinely care about energy abundance, environmental stewardship, and economic realism.
⸻
The Mirage of Solar Scale
Let’s start with the fantasy.
Could 10,000 square miles of solar panels generate the nameplate capacity to match U.S. electricity demand?
Possibly, on paper. But “nameplate” is a con.
Solar’s average capacity factor—how much energy it actually delivers over time—is just 20%. That means, for every 100 megawatts of solar panels, you get only about 20 megawatts of usable energy… and none of it dispatchable.
Sunlight doesn’t arrive on demand. It peaks at noon, fades by evening, disappears for months in winter, and plays hide and seek with clouds. A 100-mile solar farm might hit the headline wattage once a day—if you’re lucky.
⸻
System Costs Are the Real Costs
What the solar pitch forgets is this: electricity is not about generation alone. It’s about system reliability.
If you want a solar-powered grid, you need:
• Massive overbuilding of generation to account for low capacity factors
• Vast battery storage to shift supply across time
• Long-range transmission to shift power across geography
• Full dispatchable backup for seasonal lulls and cloudy weeks
Once you price in the full stack, the “cheap renewables” myth starts to collapse.
In cost model after cost model, wind with batteries emerged as the most expensive option over an 80-year lifespan.
Solar with batteries wasn’t far behind.
By contrast, gas came out cheapest. Nuclear was close behind—despite the regulatory straitjacket it’s currently forced to wear.
⸻
Nuclear: Constrained by Design
Nuclear should be our best option. It’s dense, clean, dispatchable, and scalable.
So why isn’t it?
Because we’ve regulated it into dysfunction.
Modern reactors are subject to shifting rules, endless reviews, and bureaucratic delays that span decades. The cost isn’t inherent to the technology—it’s an artifact of a system designed to make nuclear difficult.
But cracks are forming in that wall.
Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Energy, recently highlighted a subtle workaround. The U.S. Department of Energy used emergency executive authority to bypass years of permitting for diesel backup generators.
What if we applied that same logic to small modular reactors?
A simple policy shift—already proven—could unleash a new wave of safe, dispatchable, zero-carbon energy. No new laws. No Green New Deal. Just the political will to apply existing tools rationally.
⸻
The Role of Gas
Until nuclear is freed from its regulatory cage, natural gas remains the indispensable bridge.
It’s cheap, abundant, and highly responsive. It pairs well with intermittent renewables and fills the gap in ways batteries still can’t—economically or technically.
In a sane energy strategy, gas and nuclear work together:
• Gas stabilises the grid today
• Nuclear replaces it over time as baseload
• Renewables contribute where they can, without pretending they can do it all
⸻
Spain and the Cautionary Tale of Reality
When Spain’s grid collapsed recently—amid a premature pivot away from nuclear and an overreliance on solar—it didn’t take long for the excuses to emerge.
Too much renewables?
Not enough smart grid?
Or was the experiment flawed from the start?
What’s clear is this: no amount of ideology can override the laws of physics or the needs of a functioning society. Dispatchable energy isn’t optional. Reliability isn’t a luxury.
⸻
Conclusion: Build What Works
The 100-mile solar myth persists because it’s easy to believe. It’s beautiful, hopeful, and simple.
But energy is none of those things.
If we want a clean, reliable, affordable future, we need to:
• Be honest about costs
• Get serious about scale
• Unleash nuclear from regulatory purgatory
• Accept that gas will be part of the transition for decades
Wishful thinking has lit many a political campaign.
But only energy lights the world.
Richard, thank you so much for this brilliant article. It would be great if you could write something about the entropy of renewables compared to hydrocarbons and nuclear. Actually, this is what this article is about really. Your swimming pool already has relatively high entropy (like wind), so to increase the entropy and produce energy will be thermodynamically less efficient. I have a personal fascination with entropy, so I love your analogy of the swimming pool and saucepan of water. Do you have any good references/reading material on the entropy of renewables versus hydrocarbons/nuclear? For further reading? Keep up the great work. Cheers Adam
Adam - thank you in turn for taking the time to read the article, and for your kind comment and encouragement.
The entropy story around renewables is actually quite subtle. Sunlight, and electricity produced from it, being ordered, concentrated, and structured are in fact very low entropy sources. If there was some way of harnessing sunlight directly it would be an excellent energy source. Its enthusiasts forget (or are not aware) that the process of scavenging and converting it is so energy intensive that we end up with only 10 Watts of energy per square meter (1 Watt for wind) from it and that it is this property, not its entropy, that governs and limits the usefulness of these sources.
I felt I didn't really explain that aspect very well in this essay, so wrote "The Iron Law of Energy": https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-civilisation
Hi Richard, thanks for the reply. Yes I can see that solar and wind, after having been gathered and concentrated, could be described as low entropy. But is not the change in entropy of a process, analogous to the energy gradient? I can see how burning a hydrocarbon or splitting an atom yields a large change in entropy and hense a steep energy gradient. Is not the change in entropy of solar or wind much less, hence much more energy needs to be put in to get useful energy out? Cheers Adam
Change in entropy in the conversion of sunlight into electricity is not merely analogous to a reduction in gradient - it is a reduction in gradient. The difference in temperature between the sun and the earth creates a (large) energy gradient. That energy gradient is largely destroyed when the panel splits that incoming energy into 80% high-entropy waste heat and 20% low-entropy electricity. The energy gradient is reduced again when that electricity is split into the 80% needed to make the panel (which is converted into high-entropy waste heat) and 20% to power civilisation. Despite the sun having high energy gradient and the electricity produced from it having low-entropy, the final energy gradient is too low to power an advanced civilisation.
An excellent article, succinctly put with some levity, but underlined by hard science fact. I shall circulate this widely as it sums up the scientific and engineering lunacy of net zero. A final comment; as we know net zero has nothing to do with the environment, but everything to do with collapsing efficient energy supply, controlling freedom of movement and society itself!
Brilliantly instructive. Thank you.
An excellent essay, Richard. I also like the work of Simon Michaux, of the Finnish Geological Survey, which explains why we won't be able to mine enough minerals to achieve the transition to electrified transport.
Thank you for another informative essay 🙏
Just discovered you Richard. This is excellent, I will use it in my usually vain attempts to convince people of the impossibility of net zero!
Andrew - it’s great to have you along for the ride. Thanks for reading my essay. I hope it provides a useful resource in your noble and much needed efforts.
This article on net zero is a little weird, but I think that it is saying this:
When you create a wind turbine, the energy required to manufacture and deploy the wind turbine is more than the energy extracted from the wind over the lifetime of the wind turbine.
Am I correct?
Hello Nigel. It is a little weird. Thermodynamics is not particularly difficult, but its implications are not obvious in the context of renewable energy.
To your question. You are correct. But the point is not that they don’t return sufficient energy to cover their own manufacturing requirements. The point is that they don’t and will never provide energy of sufficient gradient to power an industrial society.
And, by the time we have doubled the size of the wind farm, the first windmills have come to the end of their useful life.
On reading a third time, I think I understand. To take a concrete example, if we want to build a wind farm in the North Sea out of the energy from the existing North Sea wind farms, the rate of growth of the North Sea wind farms would be very slow and during the build we could not take energy for other uses. We have only been able to build the North Sea farms so far because we have used energy from fossil or nuclear to manufacture the steel for the towers and gearboxes. Thanks Richard!
You've got it, Nigel. The purpose of an energy system is not to power the energy system's manufacturing system. Its purpose is to power us. Our energy system currently generates enough surplus after meeting its own manufacturing requirements to produce the fertiliser on which 4 billion depend for food. "Renewable energy" doesn't. So some large fraction of them would starve to death.
Yes, it’s called a transition, using fossil fuels as catalyst
Can you think of any other energy transitions in human history from a dense fuel source to a diffuse fuel source? That hasn't resulted in a collapse, I mean? I can't.
When the U.K. stopped building nuclear power stations in “the dash for gas”?
You imply that because it hasn’t happened then it isn’t possible
Both nuclear and hydrocarbon are high gradient energy sources. The UK substituted high gradient nuclear with high gradient hydrocarbon. Not high gradient nuclear with low gradient wind/solar.
I observe that a transition from high density energy source to low density energy source has never been survived. Wood -> charcoal -> coal -> oil -> gas -> nuclear. Never the other way round.
I assert basic and, as far as we can tell, non-negotiable ecological principles re. net energy vs. carrying capacity.
That isn’t what many peer reviewed articles have shown
Every one of those peer reviewed articles have been produced under conditions of, and assume as an a priori condition, an expanding net supply of energy. Their relevance to conditions of net energy contraction are, at best, unclear.
Thanks for taking the time to read it, Catherine
Brilliant article. So clearly demonstrates the fallacy that is Nut Zero. Mad Milliband is the most dangerous threat to our economy, even worse than Two Tier and Thieves