{"id":22302,"date":"2016-12-21T13:17:13","date_gmt":"2016-12-21T18:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22302"},"modified":"2016-12-21T13:17:13","modified_gmt":"2016-12-21T18:17:13","slug":"eroei-calculations-for-solar-pv-are-misleading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22302","title":{"rendered":"EROEI Calculations for Solar PV Are Misleading"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ourfiniteworld.com\/2016\/12\/21\/eroei-calculations-for-solar-pv-are-misleading\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">EROEI Calculations for Solar PV Are\u00a0Misleading<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"entry-meta\">The Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) concept is very frequently used in energy studies. In fact, many readers seem to think, \u201cOf course, EROEI is what we should be looking at when comparing different types of energy. What else is important?\u201d Unfortunately, the closer to the discussions of researchers a person gets, the more problems a person discovers. People who work with EROEI regularly say, \u201cEROEI is a tool, but it is a blunt tool. An EROEI of 100 is good compared to an EROEI of 10. For small differences, it is not so clear.\u201d<\/div>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Because of the idiosyncrasies of how EROEI works, different researchers using EROEI analyses come to very different conclusions. This issue has recently come up in two different solar PV analyses. One author used EROEI analysis\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/insurge-intelligence\/solar-is-already-producing-more-energy-than-oil-says-major-scientific-review-873d5f779f03#.f65k98wvy\">to justify scaling up of solar PV<\/a>. Another author published an article in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/ncomms13728\">Nature Communications<\/a>\u00a0that claims, \u201cA break-even between the cumulative disadvantages and benefits of photovoltaics, for both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, occurs between 1997 and 2018, depending on photovoltaic performance and model uncertainties.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Other EROEI researchers with whom I correspond don\u2019t agree with these conclusions. They recognize that in complex situations, EROEI analyses cannot cover everything. Somehow, the user needs to be informed enough to realize that these omissions result in biases. Researchers need to work around these biases when coming to conclusions. They themselves do it (or try to); why can\u2019t everyone else?<\/p>\n<p>The underlying problem with EROEI calculations is that EROEI is based on a very simple model. The model works passably well in simple situations, but it was not designed to handle the complexities of intermittent renewables, such as wind and solar PV. Indirect costs, and costs that are hard to measure, tend to get left out.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>EROEI Calculations for Solar PV Are\u00a0Misleading The Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) concept is very frequently used in energy studies. In fact, many readers seem to think, \u201cOf course, EROEI is what we should be looking at when comparing different types of energy. What else is important?\u201d Unfortunately, the closer to the discussions of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14507,277,1233,1232,13946,1564,5426],"class_list":["post-22302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-energy-return-on-energy-investment","tag-eroei","tag-gail-tverberg","tag-our-finite-world","tag-photovoltaic-energy","tag-solar-energy","tag-solar-pv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22303,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22302\/revisions\/22303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}