{"id":58473,"date":"2021-07-03T08:19:06","date_gmt":"2021-07-03T13:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58473"},"modified":"2021-07-03T08:19:06","modified_gmt":"2021-07-03T13:19:06","slug":"more-on-the-thermodynamic-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58473","title":{"rendered":"More on the thermodynamic black\u00a0hole\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

More on the thermodynamic black\u00a0hole\u2026<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

I recently wrote about the thermodynamic black hole; articles about ERoEI keep popping up in my in tray that truly baffle me\u2026\u2026 As Alice Friedemann told Chris Martenson in the podcast I discussed in the aforementioned blog post, \u201ceveryone disagrees on what to leave in or out of their ERoEI analyses\u201d\u2026.<\/p>\n

I was pointed to another\u00a0blog called Ramez Naam where the following was published\u2026:<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a graph making rounds lately showing the comparative EROIs of different electricity production methods. (EROI is Energy Return On Investment \u2013 how much energy we get back if we spend 1 unit of energy. For solar this means \u2013 how much more energy does a solar panel generate in its lifetime than is used to create it?)<\/em><\/p>\n

This EROI graph that is making the rounds is being used to claim that solar and wind can\u2019t support an industrialized society like ours.<\/em><\/p>\n

But its numbers are wildly different from the estimates produced by other peer-reviewed literature, and suffers from some rather extreme assumptions, as I\u2019ll show.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the graph.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"eroi-of-solar-wind-nuclear-coal-natural-gas-hydro-800x630\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This graph is taken from\u00a0Wei\u00dfbach et al,\u00a0Energy intensities, EROIs, and energy payback times of electricity generating power plants\u00a0(pdf link). That paper finds an EROI of 4 for solar and 16 for wind, without storage, or 1.6 and 3.9, respectively, with storage. That is to say, it finds that for every unit of energy used to build solar panels, society ultimately gets back 4 units of energy. Solar panels, according to\u00a0Wei\u00dfbach, generate four times as much energy over their lifetimes as it takes to manufacture them.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Personally, I think these figures are a bit on the optimistic side, yet the author has a problem with them for being too low\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More on the thermodynamic black\u00a0hole\u2026 I recently wrote about the thermodynamic black hole; articles about ERoEI keep popping up in my in tray that truly baffle me\u2026\u2026 As Alice Friedemann told Chris Martenson in the podcast I discussed in the aforementioned blog post, \u201ceveryone disagrees on what to leave in or out of their ERoEI […]<\/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":[31161,18896,277,31260,15173],"class_list":["post-58473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-damn-the-matrix","tag-energy-return-on-energy-invested","tag-eroei","tag-mike-stasse","tag-thermodynamics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58473","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=58473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58474,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58473\/revisions\/58474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}