{"id":51611,"date":"2020-03-06T10:33:41","date_gmt":"2020-03-06T15:33:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51611"},"modified":"2020-03-06T10:33:44","modified_gmt":"2020-03-06T15:33:44","slug":"energy-storage-and-our-unpredictable-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51611","title":{"rendered":"Energy storage and our unpredictable future"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Energy storage and our unpredictable future<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

March 4, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A review of Energy Storage and Civilization<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a fine spring day and you decide on a whim to go camping. By early afternoon you\u2019ve reached a sheltered clearing in the woods, the sky is clear, and you relax against a tree trunk rejoicing that \u201cThe best things in life are free!\u201d as you soak up the abundant warmth of the sun. As the sun goes down, though, the temperature drops to near freezing, you shiver through a long night, and you resolve to be better prepared the next night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so by the time the sun sets again you\u2019ve invested in a good down sleeping bag, you sleep through the long night in comfort due to your own carefully retained heat, and then you greet the cold dawn by cheerfully striking a match to the pile of dry sticks you had gathered and stacked the day before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this little excursion you\u2019ve coped with variable energy flows, using technologies that allowed you to store energy for use at a later time. In short, you\u2019ve faced the problems that Graham Palmer and Joshua Floyd identify as critical challenges in all human civilizations \u2013 and especially in our own future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their new book Energy Storage and Civilization: A Systems Approach<\/em><\/a> (Springer, February 2020) is an important contribution to biophysical economics \u2013 marvelously clear, deep and detailed where necessary, and remarkably thorough for a work of just over 150 pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The most widely appreciated insight of biophysical economics is the concept of Energy Return On Investment \u2013 the need for energy technologies to yield significantly more energy than the energy that must be invested in these activities. (If it takes more energy to drill an oil well than the resulting barrels of oil can produce, that project is a bust.) While in no way minimizing the importance of EROI, Palmer and Floyd lay out their book\u2019s purpose succinctly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Energy storage and our unpredictable future March 4, 2020 A review of Energy Storage and Civilization It\u2019s a fine spring day and you decide on a whim to go camping. By early afternoon you\u2019ve reached a sheltered clearing in the woods, the sky is clear, and you relax against a tree trunk rejoicing that \u201cThe best […]<\/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":[11879,11876,139,13961,269,29168,4654],"class_list":["post-51611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-an-outside-chance","tag-bart-hawkins-kreps","tag-civilization","tag-energy-return-on-investment","tag-energy-storage","tag-energy-storage-and-civilization","tag-eroi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51611","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=51611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51612,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51611\/revisions\/51612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}