On embodied energy and eROI
Dr. Lars Schernikau: Energy Economist, Commodity Trader, Author
Details including the full Blog The energy nobody counts: embodied energy, the first step in understanding eROI
are available at www.unpopular-truth.com
We spend a great deal of time discussing how much energy our electricity systems can “produce” but far less attention is given to a different question of how much energy does it take to build them in the first place?
Every power plant begins long before the first unit of electricity reaches the grid. Raw materials are extracted and processed, components are manufactured, equipment is transported, infrastructure is constructed and the entire system is assembled.
Energy is consumed at every step and the energy investment is largely invisible once the finished power plant begins operating, but it has not disappeared from the equation.
This is embodied energy, and understanding it is essential if we want to estimate how much energy an energy system truly returns to society.
When we talk about an energy technology, we tend to focus on what happens once it is operating:
- how much electricity it generates
- how much it costs to operate
- its emissions during operation
- its natural capacity factor driven by nature
- its operational utilization or curtailment and
- realistically how long it is expected to last
Figure 1: The Embodied Energy Cycle … of Electricity Generating Equipment
But a power plant does not begin its life at the moment it produces its first kilowatt-hour, as long before this moment, energy has already been consumed. (Figure1)
Raw materials must be mined, ores must be processed and refined, steel, aluminium, copper, silicon, cement and countless other materials must be manufactured. Components must be produced, transported and assembled. Roads, foundations, transmission connections and other infrastructure may need to be constructed.
All of this requires energy – embodied energy which is the energy invested in creating the system that will subsequently produce energy for us.
And once we begin looking at energy systems through this lens, an interesting question emerges:
How much energy do we have to invest before we get energy back? As we all understand that energy is not created from nothing.
For example, let’s consider a solar installation.
Sunlight itself may arrive without a fuel bill, but converting that sunlight into enough, usable electricity requires a substantial physical system.
Quartz and other raw materials must be extracted, silicon refined and processed. Glass, aluminium, copper and steel all materials used for the production of solar cells, modules, inverters and electrical equipment. Everything must then be transported to the project site and installed and after some years, dismantled and disposed.
The same principle applies to every energy technology. Wind turbines require steel, concrete, copper, composites and extensive manufacturing. Nuclear power plants require enormous quantities of specialised materials and construction. Coal and gas require mines or wells, processing, transportation and generating infrastructure.
The question, therefore, is not whether an energy technology requires energy to exist. They all do. The more useful question is how much.
From embodied energy to energy return
This is where the concept of Energy Return on Investment, or eROI, becomes very interesting. At its simplest, eROI asks us to compare the energy an energy system delivers with the energy required to make that energy available.
The principle is quite intuitive. If we invest one unit of energy and receive only slightly more than one unit back, very little surplus remains. If the same energy investment produces a much larger energy return, the situation looks very different.
This makes eROI fundamentally different from a purely financial measure.
Money can change value as commodity prices fluctuate, interest rates move, subsidies, taxes and regulation can all change project economics considerably.
Energy, however, remains physical.
A ton of steel consumed energy during production, regardless of how its financial cost was allocated, and that makes the energy invested into our energy infrastructure worth understanding.
But where do we draw the line on embedded energy?
This is where the apparently simple idea becomes considerably more complicated.
What exactly should count as embodied energy?
Should we include only the energy required to manufacture the principal equipment? Or should we include:
- mining and refining the raw materials?
- transportation?
- construction?
- supporting infrastructure?
- grid connections?
- replacement components?
- decommissioning?
The answer to this question is an important one, because changing the boundary changes the result.
Another very important variable in this equation is asset lifetime.
A system operating for 20 years will produce a different lifetime energy return from one operating for 30 or 40 years.
Natural capacity factor also matters hugely, because installed capacity tells us how much a system could generate at a given moment and not how much electricity it actually “produces” over its lifetime.
Even seemingly small assumptions can therefore have surprisingly large consequences.
This is why a headline comparisons of different energy technologies should be considered carefully. Two studies can appear to analyse the same technology and arrive at very different conclusions without either necessarily being wrong. They may simply be making different assumptions, using different lifetimes and natural capacity factors and utilization assumptions.
What happens when we apply this to a real project?
The theory becomes much more interesting when applied to something that actually exists. In my latest analysis, I use the Al Dhafra Solar PV project in the United Arab Emirates as an illustrative case.
It is one of the world’s largest solar photovoltaic projects and provides a good opportunity to ask a deceptively straightforward question.
How much energy had to be invested before this project could begin producing electricity, and how should we account for it?
Answering that means moving backwards through the physical system…
- panels become silicon, glass, aluminium and other materials
- mounting structures become steel
- electrical systems require copper and additional components
- leading us further upstream into mining, refining, manufacturing and transportation…
Suddenly, the finished solar farm that we see above ground becomes the final stage of a much larger industrial and energy chain and the precisely where embodied energy becomes useful.
It forces us to look beyond the visible generating asset and to consider that the numbers are only as good as the assumptions made.
Estimating embodied energy for a project of this scale is not a matter of finding one number in a database.
Material quantities need to be estimated, energy intensities must be assigned, manufacturing and transport assumptions need to be considered and system boundaries must be identified.
Figure 2: Embodied energy and price correlate [based on Gutwoski et al 3]
Then the energy invested must eventually be compared with the energy the project can realistically be expected to generate.
And here we have another important distinction to consider – Installed capacity is not useful electricity generation.
A gigawatt of installed capacity does not “produce” one gigawatt continuously throughout the year. Actual generation depends on the resource, location, operating conditions, natural capacity factors, utilization, curtailments, system losses and other factors. The expected lifetime then determines how long that annual output continues.
Change those assumptions and the resulting energy return changes with them.
That does not make the exercise useless… but quite the opposite.
It reveals exactly which variables we need to understand before making sweeping claims about the performance of an energy technology.
The first step
Embodied energy alone does not tell us whether solar, wind, coal, gas, hydro or nuclear is “good” or “bad”. Nor should eROI be treated as the only metric by which an energy system is judged.
Energy systems have to satisfy many requirements simultaneously: reliability, affordability, environmental impact, resource requirements, infrastructure needs and their ability to deliver energy when and where society requires it. But before comparing the energy return of different technologies, we first need to understand what we are counting.
That begins with the energy invested
And that is why embodied energy is not the conclusion of the eROI discussion.
It is only the beginning
In “The Energy Nobody Counts – Embodied energy: The first step in understanding eROI”, I go considerably further, breaking down what embodied energy entails, examining the methodological boundaries, and applying the concept to the Al Dhafra solar project to see what the numbers could look like.
The calculations and what they imply for the next step in understanding eROI, makes the story a particularly interesting one.
Take a moment to read my blog: “The Energy Nobody Counts – Embodied energy: The first step in understanding eROI
Well yes, of course energy is needed. But how much? No numbers here.
You know Nick, I usually try to be charitable. But when you baldly assert ‘no numbers here’ despite the post figure 2 there are only two possibilities left:
Figure 2 shows nothing about how much energy is needed to make generators. It just tells about materials.
So? You are not making a valid point in context of the article.
If you wish, you can go do the eROI for every different type of electrical generation system. You will be tied up for years due to the number of different systems and variations of those systems.
Nick,
Figure 2 has significant data, it also has a very revealing equation, confirming the typical cost of goods to their embodied energy, the equation having a very high correlation coefficient.
You could consider a solar panel as an example. The aluminium frame material has a value in Fig2. So does the silicon wafer, the silver electrodes, the plastic backing sheet, the glass front sheet. You could use the stated data and search for some pricing for some batteries, the inverter, switchgear etc come up with a number equating the likely energy input.
With regard to the masses in the panel, you can either buy a solar panel and break it apart, weigh the constituents or you can take a good guess at the relative masses from a combination of the product data sheet and papers published in technical magazines.
Rinse and repeat for any technology of your choice.
To say there are no numbers is not only disingenuous, it is insulting to others who can make sense of the data provided AND are willing to do the sums.
It’s time you did your own research and stopped nitpicking, if you don’t want to do the work, then maybe you should remain quiet.
So how much energy does it take to make a solar panel? It’s not a matter of doing my own research. What use is it posting articles like this if they don’t have that information.
Figure 2 is of no help there.
Which solar panel design by which company?
Well consider this, nearly 99.9% of all the food for 8.5 billion folks thanks to fossil fuels keeps them happy and allows you to sit on your a$$ and argue with WUWT about wind and solar. not to mention all the New tech it has provided. I hope you are still around when 2030 comes along and EU is busy with Nuc’s and Fracking their back yard for Gas.
My miserable calculations say that a Chinese solar panel returns in its lifetime 85% of the energy it takes to make it. It is essentially a solar powered battery charged using coal-fired electricity.
To this must be added the cost of connections, batteries, inverters and Installation hardware. Don’t forget food and accommodation for the workers.
This explains why there is no solar panel factory anywhere in the world powered exclusively by solar panels. It is a continuously losing proposition.
What Nick and I want to know is the actual total cost for producing 1 kWh of electricity. There is no mention of the cost of labor, for example. If a company wants to build a new power plant, it can barrow money from a commercial bank or issue bonds to finance the capital cost of the plant. Interest on the barrowed funds is substantial cost of the project.
I live in B.C. BC Hydro new Site C dam is now on line at full power. The construction of dam took 10 years to build at cost of 16 billion dollars and employed 5,000 workers. The Site C is the largest earthen filled dam ever built. There is video on YouTube about the dam.
BC Hydro charges only 11 cents for Tier 1 usage and 14 cents for Tier 2 usage. Values for Canadian currency which 72 cents in US currency.
WUWT only posted a snippet of the entire blog. If you click the link at the top of this post, it takes you to the full blog entry which likely has all the information/numbers you need: both the imbedded ‘energy’ costs needed for different electric generation forms and EROI.
“which likely has all the information/numbers you need”
So you haven’t read it. Noi-one has here. What is the use of WUWT posting a whole lot of words with no numbers, and then invite discussion, which again proceeds without quantitative facts?
I did read it, I’m not sure what you’re looking for (since Anthony asked nicely to limit our posting of image), but here is one of the graphs connected to the data contained in said blog http://unpopular-truth.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Electricity-Quantity-Electricity-Quality.webp
edit: since you didn’t mention this graph, YOU obviously did not read the blog. I’m not intellectually lazy enough not to do a bit of further reading/research.
That diagram, again, has absolutely no numerical information. Do you see an eROI anywhere?
“connected to the data contained in said blog”
Wherever you look, the numbers are said to be somewhere else.
You haven’t tried very hard, yet you blame everybody else for not trying harder.
Nobody has been able to simply write them down.
So you comment without reading the full article.
Your are better than that, at least you were in the past.
Swing and a miss, again.
Wind and Solar are free! Nope. Not when one does proper accounting for the energy investment to field the system in the first place.
This was not a eROI on a specific system.
This article addressed how eROI should be used.
Look squirrel. You are moving the goal posts Nick.
The article is about how to do a life cycle analysis of an energy project to determine energy inputs and outputs. That is necessary to decide if the project will have an output eROI sufficiently greater than the input eROI to make it feasible to build and operate over its project lifespan. It never promised to give you individual values.
it’s a mistake to assume that they didn’t know this
With Wind and Solar the “Fuel” is free.
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With Gas, Coal and Nuclear the fuel must be either/or mined at a cost then refined at a cost then sold and delivered at a price recovering the costs.
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However…
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With Gas, Coal and Nuclear the fuel is stored on site and added to the generators as needed.
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While with Wind and Solar the fuel CAN’T be stored anywhere and added when needed. Its only available when the weather decides to deliver it.
Hmmmmm. I guess this doesn’t apply to coal and gas plants because they just appear and disappear magically.
The relevent difference not covered by this post is amortized lifetime. Wind and solar last at best 20 years. Coal and gas last at worst 40. So proportionately, take post figure 2 x axis times 2. Halves the slope, doubles the net energy gain.
What use is this when Fig 2 does not show how much energy is needed to make any kind of generating equipment. You can’t amortize a cost that isn’t known.
Building a modern 10 MW wind turbine requires roughly 12,000 to 18,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of total embodied energy across its lifecycle (including raw material extraction, steel/fiberglass manufacturing, transport, and foundation construction)
12-18 GWh for 10MW or 1.2-1.8 TWh for 1000 MW
.
To build a 500MW Gas CCGT The total embodied energy required to manufacture the raw materials, transport components, and build the facility is estimated to be in the range of 2,000 to 5,000 terajoules (TJ)
Equivalent to roughly 550 to 1,400 GWh of primary energy input) or 1.1 – 2.8 TWh for a.1,000MW plant
Building a modern 1,100 MW nuclear power plant requires roughly 1 to 2 petajoules (PJ)
2 petajoules (PJ) is equal to 555.56 gigawatt-hours (GWh)
.
So, of the three, Nuclear is the cheapest energy wise
Nuclear power plants have thermal efficiency of about 30%. A new modern power plant using nat. gas and CCGT technology has a thermal efficiency of 63%. The US has abundant supplies of nat. gas. However for some regions that have no access to nat. gas, one of those new SMR would be good choice for generating electricity.
OK, at least some numbers, from a new set of estimates. And interestingly, it takes more energy just to build a GW CCGT plant than wind. Now I am sure people will say that the wind turbine won’t last as long. But of course what is left out is the huge consumption of fuel by the CCGT, day, for the whole of its long life.
A modern power plant using CCGT technology produces rock-solid base load electricity 24/7/365.
Wind turbines and PV solar farms can’t due this.
The main reason the wind turbines and PV solar farms have been built is due to subsidies and tax credits from ignorant governments who have brain-washed by the corrupt IPCC into believing that CO2 produced by the use of fossil fuels causes dangerous global warming. This is not possible because a cubic of air currently contains a mere 0.84 g of CO2. When these subsidies and tax credits run out, no more these wind turbines and PV solar farms will be built.
What you are leaving out is windmills and industrial Solar require taxpayer subsidies to be viable, whereas CCGT does not, and pays its own way. And operates/produces 24/7.
“What you are leaving out “
It isn’t my calculation. The author is Bryan A. But it is an energy budget calculation. Who pays for it is not part of it. Otherwise you could have endless fuss attributing cost of roads etc, or even mining.
On the low end estimate it takes less energy (1.1TWh Gas vs 1.2TWh Wind) while on the high end it takes more for Gas. However, Gas generates electricity even when the wind is still or blows a gale AND requires no ultra expensive Mega Battery Back-up to create a functioning Grid System and supply power when its needed most.
But from an EROI perspective you need to add the energy involved in manufacturer, maintenance and replacement of mining machinery and mining itself. Plus transportation. Plus any refining and storage. Plus exploration. Wind, just has maintenance.
If you want to make an EROI argument then it needs to be complete.
And Wind isn’t fueled 24/7/365. Wind isn’t fueled 24/7/265
Wind isn’t fueled 24/1 (24 hours any single day)
Wind only receives fuel when nature tunes the wind to between 9mph and 55mph. If it’s only blowing at 7mph you can’t add an additional 2mph from fuel stores and make it work. If its blowing at 58mph you can’t block 4mph and make it work which is why, in prime wind locations, wind is only available 40% of the year
The best you can depend on it maybe 20-24 hours a day 165 days a year. The other 200 days a year…not so much!
Then the calculation you want is how much of the 10MW that the wind turbine produces is actually produced on average over 24hours. And use that.
Or if you want to change the whole claim to be grid supply rather than generation then you can add the energy cost of storage.
On the flip side, if you’re looking at long term you ought to cater for the fact that gas an FFs in general will be more scarce which goes to price and more energy intensive to produce as time goes on.
At the end of the day, calculations like the one in the OP are little more than click bait pandering to the pro FF side of the debate.
That average is 40% on an annualized basis. So each 10MW Wind Turbine only delivers 4MW which means that 1,000MW farm delivers 400MW for the same 1.8TWh investment. To equal the 1,000MW Gas output would then require 2.5 times the installation requiring over 5.4TWh of energy investment Plus sufficient TWhs of battery storage to make that energy available when needed. You can’t store fuel for wind to use when needed.
“requires no ultra expensive Mega…”
What it does require is a continuous feed of mega expensive gas.
Gas is extremely cheap when Not Coupled with Uber Expensive Wind!
Gas is only expensive because it needs to be burning all day, producing nothing, to be ready to take over whenever Wind Fails!
It’s only cheap today because of the massive increase in fracking. Fracking speeds up extraction but as the wells deplete, and they will, the supply will drop more quickly and the back end of Hubbert’s curve will be precipitous.
Also…that’s not how it works. Gas is fast to ramp up and down and is used to quickly respond to changes in demand (and decreased supply for renewables). It only burns at the rate it’s needed.
Yet Gas Back-up generation, firming generation, needs to remain hot to be active at a moments notice. Which means back-up needs to remain active to be reactive in a timely manner so as not to induce a frequency drop and destabilize the grid.
It takes next to no gas to remain active. When the gas turbine is producing actual energy (eg tens or hundreds of MW) , gas usage ramps up to match the energy output of tens or hundreds of MW. When it’s idle, gas usage is just enough to keep it at operating temp.
But the usage is still there AND not utilized for the.production of electricity, wasting gas and ultimately driving up energy costs.
It’s irrelevant. Your car will idle all day but run it hard up a mountain and it’ll run out of fuel quickly. Same principle.
Funny. For each CCGT plant build, you need to build at least 2 WTG arrays. 20 years versus 40 years.
Add to this, the engineering analysis MTBF for a WTG is 4.5 years and the repairs are 50% major components and that does not include blade breakage or storm damage.
This article is a framework introduction to principles. It says little or nothing new to many WUWT readers, as many of us have been operating on these principles for many years. At this stage of introduction, the author wisely avoids digging deeply into “the numbers” as you say, and he also avoids value judgments of one energy system versus another. For some readers here, but moreover, to the broader public who might read or be influenced by the author’s works, it is important that they learn from this classic lesson that with energy as with many other things “there is more than meets the eye.” Energy Systems 101.
Operating from such a framework allows one to have a more objective analytical view of dodgy claims by activists, governments, “academic” charlatans, and rent seekers.
As an example, many years ago, some maroon in the higher education sustainability movement created pins and stickers, illustrating young people raising a wind turbine tower, as though it were the Marines on Iwo Jima raising the American flag. Of course the color scheme was predominantly green. I was not surprised by such ignorance among people who are supposed to be our educated up-and-coming leaders.
“and he also avoids value judgments of one energy system versus another.”
Which is a mistake, imo.
When spoon feeding a baby, one can only get one baby spoonful into the mouth at a time.
Put to many major points into one article and people will just stop reading.
Lansing State Journal introduce the concept of Scan and Scroll and it applies.
too many
(typo)
“At this stage of introduction, the author wisely avoids digging deeply into “the numbers” as you say, and he also avoids value judgments of one energy system versus another.”
So what are we supposed to discuss?
It takes energy to construct anything? Yes, we knew that.
Provisional costs of upcoming committed, unavoidable maintenance requirements get amortized all the time with accrual accounting systems.
If you’re going to make an argument, at least make it factual and honest.
Q: What is the average age of a wind turbine when it is decommissioned and removed and what is the most often reason they’re removed?
A: The answer is a little different from the commonly quoted “20–25 year lifespan”. That figure is the design/expected operational life, not necessarily the age at which a turbine is actually removed.
How old are turbines when they’re actually removed?A very useful new 2026 study analysed more than 12,400 wind turbines that had actually been fully decommissioned in the United States. It found:
So, for turbines that are genuinely dismantled rather than merely undergoing component replacement or life extension, around 30 years is a much better empirical estimate than 20–25 years.
The distinction is important because modern turbines are commonly designed for around 20–25 years, but life-extension work can keep them operating for another 5–10 years or more. UK evidence, for example, says extensions to 30+ years are already occurring.
Why are they removed?The most common reason isn’t catastrophic failure. It’s essentially economic obsolescence.
As a turbine gets older:
Consequently, the most important form of removal is repowering: taking the old turbines down and installing newer, much larger and more efficient turbines at the same site. IRENA describes repowering as increasingly preferred because it can substantially increase output without requiring additional land.
The 2026 US study provides particularly strong evidence for this: most sites where turbines had been decommissioned subsequently underwent repowering. The repowered sites had, on average, 86 fewer turbines but 62 MW more generating capacity.
So I’d summarise it this way Question Approximate answer Typical design life 20–25 years Typical actual age when removed ~30 years Main reason for removal Economic/technological obsolescence and repowering Failure as the main reason? Relatively uncommon What usually replaces it? Fewer, much larger and more productive turbines There’s an interesting implication here: “wind turbines only last 20 years” is somewhat misleading. The evidence from actual removals suggests that many turbines are kept running for roughly 30 years, and the decision to remove them is often driven less by the turbine being physically incapable of operating and more by the opportunity to make much more money/electricity from the site with modern equipment.
If you’re asking this in the context of wind turbine economics or the environmental case for wind, I can also quantify how much electricity a typical old turbine loses with age versus how much a replacement turbine gains, which is quite revealing.
while somehow providing reliable energy at .14 per kwh, no less.
To maintain let alone advance a modern economy the EROEI ratio needs to be orders of magnitude greater than that.
A very valid point. An EROI of 1 would imply that it supplies just enough energy to enable a replication of itself. In other words, nice to look at but practically useless.
A power plant with an EROI of 5 or 6 is very close to useless, imagine it’s got the equivalent of 10 tonnes of aluminium in there. If so, it could only ever be used to produce around 50T of aluminium, (and thanks to Fig2, you can translate that to other commodities with differing unit costs).
An EROI of 5 or 6 would have very little spare capacity to power industry, run an economy or anything above subsistence farming.
Even an EROI of 50 or 60 doesn’t leave much room to spare before you have to give up your day job and start making a new power station.
“orders of magnitude”? I am not sure you know what that means. No current energy source has an EROEI greater than about 40, i.e. less than one order of magnitude better than solar. Typical figures are usually between 5 and 10 depending on whether or not you include the conversion to electrical energy or not. Nothing has an EROEI of 500 or more which is what “orders of magnitude greater” would imply.
Point taken, in the paper the author finds that ‘in Germany [solar] eROI to be below 1, thus becoming a net energy sink’ in which case it would be orders of magnitude.
But so what? The plant wasn’t built in Germany since the engineers were smart enough to know that it wasn’t viable. Every fuel source would have an EROI less than one if built in an unsuitable place or inefficient way.
Obviously you’re referring to places like China
I know that “energy invested vs. energy returned” is a simple calculation for comparison, but time and dollar costs are important considerations for investors, too. A true ROI comparison of completely different energy generation systems would weigh the time and dollar costs of locating, design, planning, and permitting each of the seven stages before the first grader arrives on site. For example: Nuclear, vs Hydro, vs Offshore Wind vs Coal may have widely different preconstruction costs.
True, but baby steps are needed for a public with an attention span of 13 seconds.
Included in your post (but not stated) is whatever the assumptions are of the cost of money changing over time.
A review of Schernikau and Smith explains that wind and solar don’t generate enough energy to reproduce themselves. That means they are a net drain on the energy economy of the world.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-are-parasites-on-the
Thank you for a great article – posing a question I have had for many years in a much better way than I ever could!
The critical factor is exactly what you say: The assumptions on where to draw the lines around the energy inputs makes all the difference. Any discussion of eROI has to have those assumptions made completely clear before any results are discussed.
It is much too easy (and depressingly common) to cherry-pick your assumptions to get the answer you want – also known as policy-based evidence-making!
Great article.
Consider that wind power generation, at a capacity factor of, say, 35%, effectively sequesters 65% of the materials – including copper, steel, cement, resins, etc. – UNPRODUCTIVELY.
Solar PV generation, at a capacity factor of, say, 20%, effectively sequesters 80% of the materials just to sit and contribute nothing.
Don’t get me started about batteries.
And don’t get me started about the huge land area required – effectively sequestering it to unproductive use at those same percentages.
Something to think about when someone blurts out, “Sustainability!” as a faux justification for a wind + solar + batteries future. This is the absurd plan being pushed here in NY.
That is all for now.
Climate alarmists don’t have a clue.
I wonder if New York voters have enough of a clue to vote out Gov. Hochul and elect a good Republican to replace her? They can do that if they have a clue. I hear the polls are fairly close.
A good Governor could also be the right Democrat, although I am at a loss at the moment to name one.
From the article: “Energy systems have to satisfy many requirements simultaneously: reliability, affordability, environmental impact, resource requirements, infrastructure needs and their ability to deliver energy when and where society requires it.”
Well, those requirements eliminate windmills and industrial Solar from the mix. They don’t meet the requirements. And, they are not economically viable without taxpayer subsidies.
Windmills and industrial Solar and the attempts to integrate them into our electrical grids are the problem, not a solution either to our electrical needs or to the effort to reduce global CO2, which continues to rise despite the climate alarmists best efforts.
Anything other than outright rejecting new windmills and industrial solar is, to put it kindly, fuzzy thinking.
it’s funny that some claim the numbers aren’t out there. I get the numbers every month on my bill. $0.14 per kWh and slowly rising as renewables penetrate further.
Would you say the cost of petrol and diesel was increasing at about the same rate? I would, and you can’t blame renewables for those prices. Cost increases are across the board.
Used to be, in California, diesel was the lowest price at the pump back in the early 2000s and regularly 20¢ lower than 89 octane gasoline. Today it’s nearly $1.00 higher than the higher price 93 octane gasoline. So I would say Diesel is increasing in price faster than gasoline.
Sure. The point I was trying to make is that prices of everything are increasing including things that aren’t directly impacted by any additional renewable costs.
I get 56¢/KWh on Peak and 36¢/KWh off peak Commiefornia Ruinable energy pricing
Embodied energy, eROI, externalities all susceptible to hocus pocus handwavium.
This is an enlightened augmentation above Total Cost of Ownership,, which is financial in nature, using energy rather than dollars as the metric. Well done.
Nick Stokes: “Wherever you look, the numbers are said to be somewhere else.”
We are still waiting for an all-up engineering feasibility analysis for the Australian continent as a whole which demonstrates that a 90% wind and solar power generation system for the continent is clearly less expensive than Australia’s legacy coal-fired and gas-fired generation.
The wind and solar skeptics who live down there in Oz aren’t alone.
Here in the western US, we are still waiting for an all-up engineering feasibility analysis for the Western Interconnection as a whole which demonstrates that a 90% wind and solar power generation system for the Interconnection is clearly less expensive than our legacy coal-fired, gas-fired, and nuclear generation.
Wind and solar skeptics who live in New York state are likewise waiting for a comprehensive engineering feasibility analysis which demonstrates that a 90% wind and solar power generation system for their state is less expensive.
New York City by itself has the money needed to fund that kind of comprehensive feasibility analysis for the entire state as a whole.
If the claim that wind and solar backed by batteries is in fact cheaper for New Yorkers, then producing such an engineering feasibility analysis would go a long way towards proving conclusively that New York could and should move faster than it has in shutting down its legacy fossil-fueled power plants.
These kinds of analyses seem to be invisible; i.e., wherever and whenever we look, the hard engineering feasibility numbers are nowhere to be seen.
I agree with the general thrust of the article, but Figure 2 makes no sense to me. Even in 2013, I have serious doubts about being able to obtain gold for $7.50 a kilogram. Fortunately, the actual paper from 2013 is not behind a paywall. Search “gutowski 2013 mit.edu energy_required” (you need the underscore between energy and required). Figure 2 here is Figure 6 in the paper, and the vertical scale should also be logarithmic, not linear. The origin of the vertical scale is a penny ($0.01) but the graphing software they used wasn’t bright enough to add decimal places for the bottom two bars, which they did do in Figure 7 immediately following. Please correct the figure in the article (and in your slides if you don’t want to provide an unintentional laugh line).