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My reply to concerns like this has been consistent over time - where's the energy source that powers modern industrial civilisation once we run out of fossil fuels? Renewables and environmentally friendly forms of energy generation, as nice as they are, can't do it. Nuclear fusion has been 20 years away from being economical for the past 60 years, and there isn't a single nuclear power plant generating power at a profit without substantial government assistance anywhere in the world. You're right that the EROEI of the past isn't really relevant here, but the reason why it is brought up is in contrast to the negative EROEI of the present. Previously, making food meant that there was more net energy available to humans - now it means that there is less. We're eating the civilizational seed corn already. When the fundamental basis of your society is energy positive, your society is substantially more sustainable. We're currently consuming our savings faster than we can earn, and just hoping that we find a payday that can prop us up longer. There's no guarantee that that payday will ever arrive.
If you actually go and look at history, you are not going to see a slow but exponential ramp up towards progress and complexity. You'll see a series of rises followed by falls - the progress of science did actually go into reverse at multiple points in history, and we're looking at the sort of trends and conditions that very reliably precede moments like that. Earth's true carrying capacity is unknowable and constant, but if you're judging based on what humans can do, we have actually gone backwards several times (Bronze-age collapse, collapse of Rome, etc).
Not only can they do it, but solar or nuclear could do it all alone if everything else vanished. Not that it's going to be necessary. What is your basis for saying this? Is it some flimsy extrapolation like: 'Based on current consumption , If we go 100%, we'll run out of some rare mineral in 2 years, or landfill space to put old windblades'.
That's due to safety regulations. If we went back to good old rugged soviet standards, it would be dirt cheap.
Payday comes every month like clockwork. The proven reserves of oil keep increasing, to say nothing of the stuff we haven't learned to harness yet.
Does it bother you that you could have said the same thing every year since at least the industrial revolution, and be wrong every time?
Solar can't do it - solar power is great and you can do a lot with it, but solar energy is not capable of replacing conventional fossil fuels without substantial decreases in energy consumption. You can work this out by looking at how much energy society spends, and then seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply it (the answer is "too much").
Why haven't China or Russia started mass producing nuclear powerplants then? The Chinese give absolutely zero shits about safety/not cutting corners, and yet they continue to use fossil fuels rather than nuclear power, despite the massive geopolitical gains that would be associated with no longer being reliant on fossil fuels. The "safety regulations" conspiracy that somehow covers the entire globe and lets Greta Thunberg dictate energy policy to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping strikes me as substantially less realistic than current nuclear power technology being largely unprofitable.
Global oil and gas discoveries hit their lowest level for 75 years in 2021. They've since gone up, but 77% of recent oil discoveries have been off-shore (harder to access, more energy investment required to extract). Proven reserves of oil are increasing, but they're not increasing as quickly as consumption is, and that's going to be a problem when those two lines intersect. The stuff we haven't learned to harness yet... we haven't learned to harness yet, so there's no point talking about it. I don't get to claim my financial problems don't exist because the zero point energy in my completely empty wallet would be extremely valuable if I sold it.
No? Hubbert was wrong about the actual peak of conventional oil volume, but he was very close on the timing. Similarly, the world has been tracking the World3 model from the Limits to Growth study fairly well, and that predicts a halt to global GDP growth sometime in the next two decades. If you've got a convincing refutation of that model and the predictions it is making I'd love to read it.
I was under the impression that they are?
I sincerely hope that this has a net profit in terms of energy, though my gut tells me that this is likely to work out similar to the French system. Thank you for giving me information which corrects a mistaken belief I had about the world!
I was similarly under the impression that the French system is a massive subsidy to neighboring countries, as the common market regulations force them to export electricity at the wholesale price they sell it for domestically. If they wanted to take advantage of Germany's insane energy policy they'd have to raise prices for the French, and risk domestic unrest.
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The answer is 10 000-20 000 sq miles(for electricity in the US), which is the size of lake erie. For all the energy in the entire world, it's going to be a small fraction of the sahara.
They are vastly expanding their nuclear capacity as we speak. .
In 1939 the department of the interior projected that oil would last only 13 more years, and again in 1951 it was projected that oil would run out 13 years later. In Limits to growth (1972), Gold was supposed to run out in 1981, silver and mercury 1985, zinc 1990, oil before 1992. In 1992 they published the revised ‘beyond the limits’, where they pushed it all back a few years, as they always do. And 30 years later they’re still doing the same thing, like a broken record – oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now.
I think that this is ignoring the massive infrastructure rollout costs, as well as the dramatically increased power requirements caused by the replacing of petroleum in transportation. This would be a fantastic project and I hope that it goes ahead, but I have my doubts that it would take place before rising energy costs make it infeasible. I'd love to be proved wrong!
I wasn't aware - I was under the impression that they were building more plants, but not that it was going to be such a major endeavour. I hope that their project works out and that they've done all the math, and they won't end up in the same situation France is in.
When it comes to peak oil the calculations that I was interested in, and their sourcing, were the work of M. King Hubbert. He was actually correct in his predictions and managed to call the peak of US conventional oil production fairly accurately (though off on the amount), and he did so in 1956 at least.
Did you even read the link you provided? I mean, I'm open to being convinced if you have a good refutation of Limits to Growth/World3, but...
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You're telling me that they're just constantly editing it and jigging with the numbers to push the collapse another ten years back into the future, and you're linking me an article which says that the original run is "alarmingly consistent" with the collected empirical data. Again, if you've got a really convincing and thorough refutation of Limits to Growth, I'd love to read it - but you've just given me an article whose central claim is that I'm right and the model is robust.
The timing of the peak is the entire prediction! That they were correct about the “growth” part of “limits to growth” does not make them half-right. Boomers say ‘growth, no limit, no peak’. The only contentious, falsifiable part of doomers’ predictions has been repeatedly falsified. If you love being proven wrong, you must love the doomer life.
I honestly have to ask - did you even read the article you posted? I can't understand how you can make a claim like this on the basis of a piece of evidence supporting my point.
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What exactly do you think "alarmingly consistent with the most recently collected empirical data" actually means? You've also done absolutely nothing to engage with the works of the theorist I actually cited (Hubbert), presumably because he has been proven correct on a consistent basis for the past several decades.
Too snarky, I take that back.
It means they cling to their falsified beliefs, unswayed by decades of evidence.
Which predictions have they made, that have come true? I have cited several, that were refuted.
I forgot, you have Hubbert's peak. Except, in 2017 the US blasted through the previous production record, when hubbert's peak was supposed to signal the perpetually diminishing trickle of our last oil. Honestly, do you think Hubbert predicted that?
You're not taking this remotely seriously. "The model matches up with the evidence" is a direct quote from the article, and you're saying that they're unswayed by decades of evidence. Did you even read the article you cited? They came to their "falsified" belief because they looked at the evidence and based their belief on it!
Hubbert predicted the peak of US conventional oil extraction fairly accurately (I believe he was a year or two off the peak), though he was slightly off with the quantity (I don't believe he accounted for the off-shore oil, which explains the discrepancy). You haven't cited several that were refuted, you've misunderstood the claims that were being made and you even attempted to pass off an article directly arguing against your position as support for it.
Hubbert was predicting peak CONVENTIONAL oil. He was correct, and he did actually take shale oil into account, but he (also correctly) thought that shale oil wasn't a real replacement for conventional oil. Shale and conventional oil are extremely different energy sources with different depletion rates, quality, EROEI, etc, and you just make your thinking less clear if you conflate them. I can see how you would think that Hubbert was wrong if you can't even understand the arguments he's making or read the sources you're citing.
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That figure, I think, comes from this report that was linked in your link. Having skimmed it, I can't tell the exact methodology they use, but it seems they take some sort of weighted average of the area/energy/year of the various solar plants in the US and use some basic modeling as it extrapolates up. I see no mention of transmission losses or of attempting to model the geographical and grid locations the next solar plants would actually be built to reach the power production that actually does power all USA households.
Locations aren't fungible in power plants due in part to transmission losses (among other factors), and obviously this is even moreso for solar plants because location directly affects how much sunlight is received and also the weather which is affected by the location. As such, any sort of meaningful estimate of solar plant area we need to power all USA households is necessarily going to involve modeling specific plants in specific locations to match the load that's being drawn at various locations without negatively affecting the grid with congestion and such. Whatever modeling that's being done in that paper doesn't seem to come anywhere near that.
Solar and nuclear together, perhaps those two techs could be all we need for our energy needs; I'd say nuclear would be holding up 99% of the burden in that case, though.
That's before getting into the massive battery (and other energy storage) build up that would happen to account for solar's intermittent uptime if we were to go full 100% solar.
That's a bit nitpicky. Storage is a better objection to this hypothetical than transmission losses (which are well understood and not very important) . But it's a theoretical, order of magnitude discussion . He claimed that just by "seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply the energy", it would seem absurd, and it doesn't. Solar panels are a 'cut-out-the-middleman' form of agriculture, and look how much space that takes up.
But assuming doomers can get past this theoretical argument, I want to highlight just how incredibly extensive their claims are, and how far they are from proving their thesis. Before we run out of food, the oil will have to run out, the coal will run out, all the other fossil fuels will run out, nuclear will fail, solar will fail, all the renewables will fail. And not just ‘oh we couldn’t make it to 100% world energy consumption on just this one thing’, every single one has to fail completely: it’s not just that they each don’t scale, they all somehow don’t work anymore.
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Aside from the question of how long that state would persist if we run out of alternatives, there's also the question of "so what?". Let's imagine that the government will have to subsidize energy production until the end of time, how is that not sustainable?
Generating power at a profit sans subsidies means that it produces energy at a price that society can reasonably pay and continue to support. If the power plant needs government subsidies to continue as a going concern then there's a decent chance that it isn't actually a net positive in terms of energy once you factor in maintenance, having to pay for nuclear scientists etc. The point of stressing profitability is to make sure that you don't have government money disguising what is actually a net energy loss (like encouraging farmers to burn oil growing corn, then turn the corn into a less efficient and less convenient fuel).
Money is not an energy unit, though. Aren't you the guy explaining how energy inefficient modern farming is? But it's perfectly profitable. I see no reason to assume lack of profits means energy inefficiency.
Obviously a financial system can be distorted, but I'm assuming a financial system that's somewhat accurate and not being gamed for the purpose of this exercise. The main reason profit matters here is that a power generation system should be able to support more economic activity than it requires to keep itself running. If you have a powerplant that produces 50 dollars worth of power after you feed it 100 dollars of raw inputs/labour, you're either going to be running it for some other reason (isotopes maybe) or not at all.
Generally I agree that energy efficiency would mean profits, this is why I mentioned that I doubt profitability will remain a problem, once the alternatives are exhausted. That said, it's not impossible that due to some market funkiness the two metrics will become uncorrelated. If it turns out you have to pay everyone in the nuclear industry at least a 7 figure salary, so they don't fuck off to do high-frequency trading, or something else that's short-term profitable, but ultimately pointless, I say bite the bullet, and subsidize their salaries. What you're addressing with that move is income distribution, not energy efficiency.
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