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.
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/.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
I see figures that the time to return the energy invested with a solar panel is about a year. Let's say two years with other enabling infrastructure included. Useful life is >30 years. Putting aside the fact that solar panels are primarily manufactured with large heaps of fossil energy today, is >10x return on energy investment not theoretically enough to power society and the expansion of solar power?
Does a 1 GW solar farm not have the same (although intermittent) output energy as a 1 GW nuclear plant? Why should there be a physical difference between the two, other than the fact that the solar farm takes more energy to set up?
I don't think your argument makes sense because 1. renewables have decent energy return on investment and 2. electricity is identical no matter the generator, can (theoretically) be used to power all of our needs, and can be concentrated from diffuse sources.
Hello Jackson. It seems that almost every element of my argument has failed and I'll have to repeat much of it here.
The amount of energy your solar farm produces is a necessary but not sufficient quantity. The gradient of that energy - the property of energy that determines its rate of conversion into useful work - is vastly lower. That gradient appears to be comparable at the point of application because of the vast quantity of high gradient energy available to make the device. If you plugged the device's manufacturing system into the output of the device, there would be almost nothing left for our application. That "almost nothing" would be the true gradient of the device.
> Let's say two years with other enabling infrastructure included
No, let's not. The pervasiveness and energy intensity of the global industrial manufacturing system that your solar panel is the product of is as breathtaking as it is invisible. The rivet in the side of the cargo container that transports the lime for the cement in the wall of the industrial oxygen plant for the steel for the truck that mines the silicon for the chip in the computer that the contract for the consignment of rare earth elements was written for the magnets in the gearbox of the wind turbine was made with energy obtained from high grade energy sources - either hydrocarbon or nuclear. Likewise the hundreds of millions of other components, almost all of them single points of failure and a vast number of them lacking any "renewable energy" derived substitute. That system cannot be run on low gradient energy sources at all, much less with the energy return you suppose is achievable.
As a test: propose an experiment in which the entire manufacturing chain for an entire country's "renewable" energy system - mining (including mining equipment), refining, construction, operation, maintenance, repair and endless replacement of all equipment, together with all of the roads and buildings, and industrial food manufacturing system feeding the workers, and the trillions of dollars of auxiliary equipment required to mitigate intermittency - is created from so-called "renewable" energy sources - with enough surplus to sustain the c. 4 billion humans who's survival currently depends on the hydrocarbon powered industrial food system.
I expect you will receive an unenthusiastic response. Do let me know in a comment below how it goes.
Doesn’t this demonstrate just how wonderful electric current is, as we can have any energy gradient we want as long as we have electricity as our universal common currency
[I have to admit I’m not comfortable with the term energy gradient unless we are talking about Q vs T plots, but I don’t think that’s what you are referring to]
Jonathan I'd love to discuss this with you but every question you ask, I've addressed in my essay. Now, if there are defects in that - and there might be - then I'd like to understand them. But may I suggest you read it first?
No - it doesn't demonstrate how wonderful electric current is because how wonderful it is, and what energy gradient we can have, depends on where it comes from. And to understand that, you have to be comfortable with the term energy gradient.
> But the energy to boil the egg didn’t come from the weak, diffuse energy in the first swimming pool. It came from split atoms and million year old sunlight in a second one.
Pretty sure, for wind, it comes from the wind blowing and turning the turbine. Which, after all this blather is the same mechanism that all the fossil fuels use.
If I wish to break a large slab in my garden I use a sledgehammer or a digger. Something that can concentrate the energy needed to overcome resistance in the slab. If I use a series of small hammers producing the same overall energy over a longer time the slab is less likely to break. It may due to fatigue but that still depends on the individual strength of the hammers.
Having more hammers does not mean the slab will break in any meaningful time frame if there is enough resistance in the slab. Similarly the slab will not break if rained on unless you want to wait a hundred years.
So to have a useful and timely way of slab breaking you need a concentrated hence energy dense source to provide a quicker way to break the slab. You need some source that can deal with rapid onset of energy required. That can ramp from zero to a high energy input quickly. Like a sportscar basically.
Wind doesn’t have that capability. Nor solar. A battery can have that but will always be a poor comparison to chemical or nuclear. A plasma battery may be able to do it but then they haven’t bee invented.
Thank you for your thoughtful critique, Peter. I think you’ve allowed yourself to be confused between the process by which the fuel is *created* and the process by which the fuel is *used*. You might reread the passages on radiant vs chemical energy, and space and time concentration.
Another way to think about it is the difference between a modest annual income - “renewable energy”, and a $1 billion inheritance from your Aunt - “fossil fuel”. Both the same mechanism, as you would say. Very different outcome.
I did read all that, and since it made no sense I ignored it. The wind turbines are either inducing energy right now or they aren’t. They are. In exactly the same way as all turbines work. That the energy is diffuse seems to be neither here, nor there. The amount of energy the earth gets per day from the sun, harnessed directly or indirectly (wind) is vastly more than we need. There may be other problems with wind like intermittency etc, and that might be unsolvable (but I doubt it given battery technology).
What’s your opinion on hydropower. The water in a damned lake isn’t dense but diffuse - the swimming pool of your analogy. Yet it looks like that diffuse potential energy can be easily harnessed to produce the world’s biggest turbines.
> The amount of energy the earth gets per day from the sun, harnessed directly or indirectly (wind) is vastly more than we need.
The amount of energy in a swimming pool is vastly more than we need to boil an egg.
I can’t improve on my explanation of the problem with vast amounts of very low gradient energy, made to appear like high gradient energy by concentrating it with devices made with very high gradient energy.
Hydropower is the conversion of gravitational potential energy into electrical energy. Just as there is a large amount of solar energy in our environment, there is a large amount of gravitational potential energy on the Tibetan Plateau relative to sea level. If there was a gradient (and water), then we could convert it. There isn’t. That’s why it’s called a plateau. A vast amount of energy with no gradient is indistinguishable from there being no energy.
The reason hydropower makes an immaterial contribution to our energy supply (6%) is because there are so few gradients of sufficient materiality.
If energy gradient still makes no sense to you then there’s not much more I can do. But my experience, from discussion with others, is that thermodynamics eventually clicks if you keep thinking about it. All the best.
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.
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.
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/.
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". ;-)
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.
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
Love it Richard. Hopefully it will be shared widely!
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
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.
I see figures that the time to return the energy invested with a solar panel is about a year. Let's say two years with other enabling infrastructure included. Useful life is >30 years. Putting aside the fact that solar panels are primarily manufactured with large heaps of fossil energy today, is >10x return on energy investment not theoretically enough to power society and the expansion of solar power?
Does a 1 GW solar farm not have the same (although intermittent) output energy as a 1 GW nuclear plant? Why should there be a physical difference between the two, other than the fact that the solar farm takes more energy to set up?
I don't think your argument makes sense because 1. renewables have decent energy return on investment and 2. electricity is identical no matter the generator, can (theoretically) be used to power all of our needs, and can be concentrated from diffuse sources.
Hello Jackson. It seems that almost every element of my argument has failed and I'll have to repeat much of it here.
The amount of energy your solar farm produces is a necessary but not sufficient quantity. The gradient of that energy - the property of energy that determines its rate of conversion into useful work - is vastly lower. That gradient appears to be comparable at the point of application because of the vast quantity of high gradient energy available to make the device. If you plugged the device's manufacturing system into the output of the device, there would be almost nothing left for our application. That "almost nothing" would be the true gradient of the device.
> Let's say two years with other enabling infrastructure included
No, let's not. The pervasiveness and energy intensity of the global industrial manufacturing system that your solar panel is the product of is as breathtaking as it is invisible. The rivet in the side of the cargo container that transports the lime for the cement in the wall of the industrial oxygen plant for the steel for the truck that mines the silicon for the chip in the computer that the contract for the consignment of rare earth elements was written for the magnets in the gearbox of the wind turbine was made with energy obtained from high grade energy sources - either hydrocarbon or nuclear. Likewise the hundreds of millions of other components, almost all of them single points of failure and a vast number of them lacking any "renewable energy" derived substitute. That system cannot be run on low gradient energy sources at all, much less with the energy return you suppose is achievable.
As a test: propose an experiment in which the entire manufacturing chain for an entire country's "renewable" energy system - mining (including mining equipment), refining, construction, operation, maintenance, repair and endless replacement of all equipment, together with all of the roads and buildings, and industrial food manufacturing system feeding the workers, and the trillions of dollars of auxiliary equipment required to mitigate intermittency - is created from so-called "renewable" energy sources - with enough surplus to sustain the c. 4 billion humans who's survival currently depends on the hydrocarbon powered industrial food system.
I expect you will receive an unenthusiastic response. Do let me know in a comment below how it goes.
Doesn’t this demonstrate just how wonderful electric current is, as we can have any energy gradient we want as long as we have electricity as our universal common currency
[I have to admit I’m not comfortable with the term energy gradient unless we are talking about Q vs T plots, but I don’t think that’s what you are referring to]
Jonathan I'd love to discuss this with you but every question you ask, I've addressed in my essay. Now, if there are defects in that - and there might be - then I'd like to understand them. But may I suggest you read it first?
No - it doesn't demonstrate how wonderful electric current is because how wonderful it is, and what energy gradient we can have, depends on where it comes from. And to understand that, you have to be comfortable with the term energy gradient.
Oh, and I did read it. That’s why I commented. Why would I comment without reading it
Electric current is just electric current, it doesn’t matter where it comes from, hence it’s our universal currency
I’m afraid I will have to try harder to understand what you mean by energy gradient as it’s clearly different to what I was taught
OK. Thermodynamics isn't particularly difficult, but nor does it lend itself to intuition.
I remember the lectures well. You use the term gradient when surely it should be differential
A differential in energy density establishes an energy gradient.
Sorry, excuse me but I am on the spectrum. A differential in energy density is a differential, not a gradient
Is that what you are really referring to then, a difference in energy density?
> But the energy to boil the egg didn’t come from the weak, diffuse energy in the first swimming pool. It came from split atoms and million year old sunlight in a second one.
Pretty sure, for wind, it comes from the wind blowing and turning the turbine. Which, after all this blather is the same mechanism that all the fossil fuels use.
If I wish to break a large slab in my garden I use a sledgehammer or a digger. Something that can concentrate the energy needed to overcome resistance in the slab. If I use a series of small hammers producing the same overall energy over a longer time the slab is less likely to break. It may due to fatigue but that still depends on the individual strength of the hammers.
Having more hammers does not mean the slab will break in any meaningful time frame if there is enough resistance in the slab. Similarly the slab will not break if rained on unless you want to wait a hundred years.
So to have a useful and timely way of slab breaking you need a concentrated hence energy dense source to provide a quicker way to break the slab. You need some source that can deal with rapid onset of energy required. That can ramp from zero to a high energy input quickly. Like a sportscar basically.
Wind doesn’t have that capability. Nor solar. A battery can have that but will always be a poor comparison to chemical or nuclear. A plasma battery may be able to do it but then they haven’t bee invented.
Thank you for your thoughtful critique, Peter. I think you’ve allowed yourself to be confused between the process by which the fuel is *created* and the process by which the fuel is *used*. You might reread the passages on radiant vs chemical energy, and space and time concentration.
Another way to think about it is the difference between a modest annual income - “renewable energy”, and a $1 billion inheritance from your Aunt - “fossil fuel”. Both the same mechanism, as you would say. Very different outcome.
All the best.
I did read all that, and since it made no sense I ignored it. The wind turbines are either inducing energy right now or they aren’t. They are. In exactly the same way as all turbines work. That the energy is diffuse seems to be neither here, nor there. The amount of energy the earth gets per day from the sun, harnessed directly or indirectly (wind) is vastly more than we need. There may be other problems with wind like intermittency etc, and that might be unsolvable (but I doubt it given battery technology).
What’s your opinion on hydropower. The water in a damned lake isn’t dense but diffuse - the swimming pool of your analogy. Yet it looks like that diffuse potential energy can be easily harnessed to produce the world’s biggest turbines.
> The amount of energy the earth gets per day from the sun, harnessed directly or indirectly (wind) is vastly more than we need.
The amount of energy in a swimming pool is vastly more than we need to boil an egg.
I can’t improve on my explanation of the problem with vast amounts of very low gradient energy, made to appear like high gradient energy by concentrating it with devices made with very high gradient energy.
Hydropower is the conversion of gravitational potential energy into electrical energy. Just as there is a large amount of solar energy in our environment, there is a large amount of gravitational potential energy on the Tibetan Plateau relative to sea level. If there was a gradient (and water), then we could convert it. There isn’t. That’s why it’s called a plateau. A vast amount of energy with no gradient is indistinguishable from there being no energy.
The reason hydropower makes an immaterial contribution to our energy supply (6%) is because there are so few gradients of sufficient materiality.
If energy gradient still makes no sense to you then there’s not much more I can do. But my experience, from discussion with others, is that thermodynamics eventually clicks if you keep thinking about it. All the best.