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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I'm totally fine with adopting that as a metric - you just have to include all the calories that go into refining the fuel, building the plant, etc.

Why do we care about calories in?

And for something like solar power, how is this computed? Sure, I get that you're going to somehow compute all the calories that go into manufacturing the thing, but then, how do we get calories in from the sun? Is it just the local radiance captured? Is it net of some heat output? Is it actually total solar radiance on Earth's surface (since we're inefficiently only capturing a portion of those calories)? Do we actually compute the calories that go into the fuel of the sun's fusion reactor? Is there some different calculation used for a fusion reactor 'up there' compared to one we might make 'down here'? If so, why?

And for something like solar power, how is this computed?

Because the metric you actually, seriously use is energy returned on energy invested. We don't have to invest any extra energy into the sun to make it shine, nor do we have to make the wind blow ourselves. All we actually care about is the return on the energy we invested to capture that energy. The reason we care about sourcing uranium/nuclear fuel is because it takes human labour to convert uranium from ore to fuel pellets.

because it takes human labour

Ok, so am I correct in understanding that your measurement of efficiency is rooted in human caloric expenditure for 'calories in'? If so, then it's a bit strange to think that modern agriculture is less efficient than in the past, since in the past, we had >90% of the population performing hard labor to produce a sustenance level of food product, whereas now, we have about 1% of the population producing an incredible surplus. There is obviously some additional human effort in building the machines and gathering the fuel, but I think it's incredibly unlikely that if we were to tally that all up, the agriculture-specific human caloric input would be anywhere close to 90% of the workforce.

Ok, so am I correct in understanding that your measurement of efficiency is rooted in human caloric expenditure for 'calories in'?

I think he means "total" caloric expenditures, not just "human". That is, we're cheating by having oil do all the work for us. The sun doesn't count because it will be hitting the Earth no matter what, so we're not "expending" anything. The work that would go into building solar panels would count, though.

I was hoping to get a nice distinction somewhere along those lines that I could probe to see if I could make it consistent, but what I got was "because it takes human labour". If @FirmWeird would like to clarify and say that it's not about human expenditure and about something else instead (maybe some sort of "no matter what" test that I'd want to probe for details), then I'd be very pleased to investigate.

I dunno, it makes some intuitive sense to me, so I probably could go pretty far defending the idea, though I'm not sure if I can formally define the distinction.

The general idea that expendable resources should be accounted for as being expended. Expressing that as calories / KWh is just to have a common denominatior, we do the same when we calculate the stuff in USD, you don't count sunlight in USD either.

So why KWh and not USD? I could see an argument that denominating everything in USD obscures certain material realities, which units of energy do not.

expendable resources

I hate to say it, but we're back to the sun. The hydrogen inside of the sun is, indeed, an expendable resource. Does it matter whether it is being 'expended' up there or down here in a lab?

I mean, doesn't it? That shit's getting burned one way or the other, and we're unlikely to stop it even if we wanted to, so we might as well put it to good use?

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For EROI, you don't count the solar input for a solar plant, only the energy used in building and maintaining the plant. For the same reason for fossil fuel plants you don't count the energy in the fuel, but you do count the energy extracting and refining the fuel.

Using EROI at all for agriculture is just kinda weird.

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