{"id":65387,"date":"2023-06-02T10:47:56","date_gmt":"2023-06-02T15:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65387"},"modified":"2023-06-02T10:47:56","modified_gmt":"2023-06-02T15:47:56","slug":"models-hide-the-shortcomings-of-wind-and-solar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65387","title":{"rendered":"Models Hide the Shortcomings of Wind and Solar"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ourfiniteworld.com\/2023\/06\/02\/models-hide-the-shortcomings-of-wind-and-solar\/\">Models Hide the Shortcomings of Wind and Solar<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>A major reason for the growth in the use of renewable energy is the fact that if a person looks at them narrowly enough\u2013such as by using a model\u2013wind and solar look to be useful. They don\u2019t burn fossil fuels, so it appears that they might be helpful to the environment.<\/p>\n<p>As I analyze the situation, I have reached the conclusion that energy modeling misses important points. I believe that profitability signals are much more important. In this post, I discuss some associated issues.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Overview of this Post<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In Sections [1] through [4], I look at some issues that energy modelers in general, including economists, tend to miss when evaluating both fossil fuel energy and renewables, including wind and solar.\u00a0<strong>The major issue in these sections is the connection between high energy prices and the need to increase government debt.<\/strong>\u00a0To prevent the continued upward spiral of government debt, any replacement for fossil fuels must also be very inexpensive\u2013perhaps as inexpensive as oil was prior to 1970.\u00a0<strong>In fact, the real limit to fossil fuel extraction and to the building of new wind turbines and solar panels may be government debt that becomes unmanageable in an inflationary period.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In Section [5], I try to explain one reason why published Energy Return on Energy Investment (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.investopedia.com\/terms\/e\/energy-return-on-investment.asp#:~:text=Energy%20Return%20on%20Investment%20(EROI)%20is%20the%20amount%20of%20energy,difficult%20to%20extract%20or%20produce.\">EROEI<\/a>) indications give an overly favorable impression of the value of adding a huge amount of renewable energy to the electric grid. The basic issue is that the calculations were not set up for this purpose.\u00a0<strong>These models were set up to evaluate the efficiency of generating a small amount of wind or solar energy, without consideration of broader issues.<\/strong>\u00a0If these broader issues were included, EROEI indications would be much lower (less favorable).<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Models Hide the Shortcomings of Wind and Solar A major reason for the growth in the use of renewable energy is the fact that if a person looks at them narrowly enough\u2013such as by using a model\u2013wind and solar look to be useful. They don\u2019t burn fossil fuels, so it appears that they might be [&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":[1233,13043,1232,674],"class_list":["post-65387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-gail-tverberg","tag-modelling","tag-our-finite-world","tag-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65387","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=65387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65388,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65387\/revisions\/65388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}