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The Forum > Article Comments > Is alternative energy worth it? > Comments

Is alternative energy worth it? : Comments

By Don Aitkin, published 1/10/2014

Alternative energy is so expensive that it can barely pay for itself, let alone support a civilisation.

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Rhian,

You are correct. The Labor-Green carbon restraint policies were costing $20 billion per year and legislated to escalate. The carbon price was part of that and that has been removed. But most of the rest remains. It's an enormous waste. Just think what could be done with $20 billion a year if not being wasted on useless policies that will not make an iota of difference to the climate or sea levels.

For those interested in what the cost means per person or per family, see: http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/in-the-next-37-years-labor-will-spend-60000-per-australian-to-change-the-weather/
Posted by Peter Lang, Wednesday, 1 October 2014 5:29:20 PM
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Taswegian, many thanks for pointing to the article by J.Bull on the 'Resilience' website; it provides a more realistic list of EROI's, quite different to the crude and poorly qualified graph Don used in his article and also from the table I got from Wiki.

Bull's article highlights the points that in calculating meaningful EROI's:
- a consistent methodology has to be used
- the same form of energy output (electrical not heat) has to used
- The huge range of EROI's from many examples of plants for each technology should be taken into consideration.
- EROI's for gas and coal generation are diminishing whereas for wind and solar it is increasing as new technologies increase efficiency.

Re your point about EROI 2 compared to 0.75 would give a negative comparable value of -1.5 what to make of that? I suggest that negative comparable values are meaningless because:
As as EROI approaches 1, ie. output = input, the net output gets closer to zero. That makes anything with a higher net output than zero infinitely better than one with zero net output. Anything with negative net output is 'even worse' than one with zero, but it's not possible get worse than infinitely worse. This means that such a situation would never arise in a 'sane, logical' world. Such a plant would never be built.

As for my apparently 'wanting to retract' the original list from Wiki, this is because reading Don's article resulted in my doing about four hours of desktop research into EROI, which I have summarized in my previous posts. I have found that there are many EROI tables, most of which are wrong or misleading. I hope Don simply was not aware of this and that his article is merely ignorant rather than mischievious.
Posted by Roses1, Thursday, 2 October 2014 1:07:56 AM
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Readers, roses and ghosty,

I'm a reporter and commentator here. I found an article that led me to another article, and those articles are the basis of my essay. If you disagree, your target is Morgan/Weissbach. Show how they must be wrong, not how I must be deluded!
Posted by Don Aitkin, Thursday, 2 October 2014 10:27:14 AM
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Don,'Thank you for this and your previous articles. They are almost always well written, balanced and highly informative, as the large amount of discussion they generates shows. Clearly, they are educating others, whether they choose to admit it or not.

I't's unfortunate that the level of much of the discussion is so juvenile and uninformed. Most of the commenters don't have a clue about the subject or energy, or policy analysis, and haven't even bothered to read the research you referenced. One commenter told you to :do your research" then cited a Wikipedia article to try to refute the references you cited. How pathetically hypocritical is that?
Posted by Peter Lang, Thursday, 2 October 2014 10:53:11 AM
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Don, thanks for your thoughts on my article. Most of the discussion about energy system transformation for emissions reduction does not appear to be mindful of net energy and EROI. If the intention is a wholesale change to the way we power society - and it should be - these considerations appear to block off many of the pathways for deep decarbonisation. Its important to factor these constraints into any energy policy that envisions change.

My article was also incidentally published at The Energy Collective:

http://theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/471651/catch-22-energy-storage

There is some very well informed commentary, nearly 300 comments between them, which raise all the objections that have come up here. The central thesis has stood up well to that debate. Most of the "author is crazy" have been comprehensively addressed and I'd refer others to those discussions to see how.

I work with the idea of a minimum societal EROI of about 7. In fact, its probably much higher than that. The work of Lambert, Hall and others puts a society operating at EROI of 7 as a marginal society capable of feeding itself, and not much more. For the amenities of modernity, health care, education, and leisure, its probably double that, which further excludes various energy sources.

I'll point out that Weissbach was not my sole reference. I also use the work of renewable energy researchers from the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project, from solar researchers Prieto and Hall who have studied the Spanish solar development, and the biophysical economics community, such as Lambert et. al. Their conclusions are all consistent with the view my article presents. The finding is not controversial and the scramble to present it as such would probably leave those researchers bemused.

These studies can be expanded and refined, but as Don says, most of the objections are at the margins. The central idea seems sound, and a wholesale transition of societal energy to low EROI sources, particular ones that require storage (or its converse, redundancy) doesn't appear possible. For climate change, that means pursuit of nuclear power as the central plank of decarbonised energy.
Posted by John Morgan, Thursday, 2 October 2014 2:31:58 PM
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Thank you, John. I could have stated that you used other sources, but the Weissbach paper was so powerful that I saw it as the basis.
Posted by Don Aitkin, Thursday, 2 October 2014 4:18:55 PM
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