The Catch-22 of Energy Storage;
Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power. Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization.
h/t DrO
So, it follows that we have a choice, increase power sources or reduce civilization. I think the latter is the Agenda 21 plan.
The wind turbines currently spinning in Ontario would have to operate for more than 30 years to break even for their construction costs. They will probably not last more than 12 years before they break down and become completely unserviceable. So it stands to reason that a wind turbine can’t even generate enough energy to build another wind turbine.
Yes but maths is hard.
This has been known for years, but not accepted by the PC crowd.
Once all access to other peoples money dries up, expect these towering monuments to Kleptocracy to remain immobile and rusting across the countryside.
When saving energy leaves you using more energy than before, you would expect poverty to follow.
In Ontar-I -Owe.
But if we don’t build green energy systems, how can retired Ontario Liberal insiders get rich off the Greenie Carpet Bagging scam?
This analysis isn’t entirely accurate. The problem is contained in this paragraph:
There is a minimum EROEI, greater than 1, that is required for an energy source to be able to run society. An energy system must produce a surplus large enough to sustain things like food production, hospitals, and universities to train the engineers to build the plant, transport, construction, and all the elements of the civilization in which it is embedded. For countries like the US and Germany, Weißbach et al. estimate this minimum viable EROEI to be about 7.
While it’s true that the EROEI needs to be above 1, it doesn’t necessarily need to be far above. An EROEI of 1.5 just means you have to build a very large number of these plants to generate enough surplus energy for society. So at that point, the discussion should shift to efficiency of various options.
Just as expected, this analysis is causing immense headaches for the greens. Particularly since the energy source they loathe the most, nuclear, has the highest EROEI. Approximately two orders of magnitude difference. They’re in the comments reduced to spluttering about cost reductions since 2007, calmly ignoring the fact that cost reductions have mostly come from Chinese factories putting German and American solar manufacturers out of business.
No, Pete, it needs to be as far above 1 as possible. The point of energy systems is NOT to tie up energy production mostly making more energy production systems. The point of energy systems is to make as huge a surplus as possible with the minimum expenditure of resources so that all the rest of us can go on to other, more useful activities.
Energy Returned On Energy Invested EROEI. A basic calculation of how animals survive in an environment. Calories consumed vs calories expended to survive. Animals must achieve 1 or greater or die. Power systems have other factors at play. Does humanity require energy systems to survive? No. We need energy systems to sustain a complex economic system that keeps us from living in caves and using animal skins for protection from the elements.
EROEI is measure of efficiency, period. Financial costs and dollar value returned ($ROI) are an entirely separate matter.
The introduction of large scale intermittent (read unpredictable) power sources into a system that is already pushing the limits of capacity is just plain foolish. The pipe dream of storage does not measure up to any critical analysis.
The silo effect of Green Industrial planning, I had a Typo which was Indudtrial-which I almost left in place, is the basic approach for most Government Projects, from my observation. cgh; Your final paragraph will be ignored, as you know, but it does strength the argument for Nuclear and a water powered sourcing.
Is there any current activity in development of Tidal Basin and/or Ocean Wave motion technology? Wonder why this approach seems to have fallen by the wayside. Guess the Carbon Scammers did not get in on this approach early enough, so their government friends have not passed this as acceptable for subsidies. Cheers;
cgh, you’re disagreeing with my statement by agreeing with it. I said it should shift to arguing about efficiency, and you proceeded to argue about efficiency.
Surely choosing an EROWI of a lower value is to deliberately choose the lesser efficiency?
A ratio of 1.5 versus 7 is to invest a much higher amount of energy for minimal return.
Also any error in your assumptions can quickly drop your return into negative ranges.
Especially energy projects with government help.
Increasing the scale can only increase the waste.
I’m guessing the capital/maintenance costs for wave tech are high, the ocean is a rough place.
Tidal basins that are good enough are rare.
Another point brought up in the first article, to which this one was a commentary, is that wind turbines have to be hugely over-engineered, more so than pretty much any other energy production source, since they have to withstand the massive fluctuations in wind speeds to which they are exposed and during which they are, ironically, unable to harvest useable energy when wind speeds are at their highest — a further inefficiency in wind energy production.
Wind power is like pretty girls. It might be elegantly beautiful and graceful, however it’s highly overrated, extremely high maintenance, and doesn’t put-out as advertised.
The rules of diminishing returns will bite you there. More of something doesn’t always mean better. Lets look at windmills. Windmills are a Millennia aged technology. The only thing different from modern electrical windmills and their ancient ancestors is size, material and output. Windmills didn’t pull mankind out of the agricultural era.
Watermills were a start of that since they could do many the same things as a windmill but faster and more efficiently and more RELIABLY! This goes for most “renewable” energy sources. They are weak and cost more to maintain then other solutions. Besides having an EROEI of 1.5 means that if anything goes wrong, things will go wrong badly as there is minimal buffer for accidents or catastrophes.
Mike, there’s been limited development of tidal over the past several years. The economics, which is to say the EROEI, just doesn’t support it. The collectors are huge for the energy actually produced. Simple fact is that atomic forces are vastly more powerful than mechanical or chemical ones.
Admit it; you don’t like the implications regarding wind and nuclear from this, do you?
I still believe the issue is one of return on investment
in the old fashioned sense, money! None of these
alternatives would exist without massive subsidies.
This is why a Chevy Volt has about a 12 year ROE in spite
of huge government subsidies. Long before you reach that
point, you are forced to pay some $20,000 or more for a
new battery that may or may not catch fire due to flammable
electrolytes.
It is the same with bird shredders. Their service life
will in most cases, never reach the point of ROI. The
real problem is that the very idea of storing energy
in batteries, converting it back to AC and sending
it down transmission lines is insane both in terms
of practicality and costs.
You cannot build enough bird-shredders or batteries to even
cover 10 percent of our energy needs without bankrupting
America. That is because in this day and age, the contracts
go to Solyndra like crony capitalist companies that rape the 1/2
billion and declare bankruptcy. Even without that kind of
corruption, this is an economy killing concept!
Quite right Leonard. Absent subsidies the financial cost of the power produced includes EROEI. Of course the idea of battery storage is insane. And simply from a basic physics point of view there will be no new electromotive series unless someone invents a new element, and the Universe as we know it was pretty much done with that microseconds after the Big Bang.
Take a good look around. From bridges slowly falling apart to ageing energy infrastructure, we’ve basically been coasting on the invested capital of the 1950s and 1960s for the past half century.
absolutely I like it. I’ve been a backer of nuclear from day 1. Wind power is a farce, we gave it up a century ago for more economical sources. Solar is great, for satellites. As I said originally, and I’ll say again, the arbitrary value of 7 in the original article has no merit. If I can build a power plant A that produces more energy than it consumes, then it’s a positive. But if I can build a plant B that produces twice the surplus energy as A, I’d be stupid to build A over B unless there’s a very good reason why A should be chosen. The more efficient plant should be the choice the majority of the time. However, there may be times when efficiency isn’t necessarily the best option either. For instance, a nuclear plant on an active fault line might not be the best choice…I would suggest a coal plant might be best due to the high potential for disaster. And wind power might be suitable for a large geographical area with a sparse population (the prairies, minus the cities), as it greatly reduces the cost of transmission. Do you understand my what I’m trying to say?
Great point cgh, but as a Millwright, there is another issue I
have with wind farms. Let us assume that they were designed
by engineers with an IQ above the average Internet Troll.
I am probably the only mechanic in America who has his own
$3,300 dollar PDA based vibration spectrum analyzer and
$5,000+ LASER shaft alignment kit. My problem is this:
After seeing 25-30 percent of the units in a wind farm down at
any given time, there seems to a serious maintenance issue.
These days, an SKF condition monitoring system can easily be
fitted to the elements of a bird shredder farm;
Assuming two pillow block bearings (Fixed at the fan end and
floating at the drive end,) the fan bearings could be protected
by 2x, 2y and one axial pickup. The same goes for the gearbox
and the generator. These devices are so sensitive that they
can detect issues that are years away from being a problem.
If the equipment is properly designed, the rigging points inside
the nacelle should permit anything short of replacing the entire
gearbox or generator. Assuming a reasonable maintenance
schedule, these things should last forever with the right kinds
of shutdown devices that would prevent the kinds of damage
that would leave them idle.
The only answer is that the government that subsidized their
construction did not offer them the money to maintain them
or repair them.
The problem is that they was designed by politicians and not
engineers!
Sorry, were not was.
It’s an issue of bearings used. Larger bearings = reduced maintenance, but larger bearings = reduced efficiency. There was an article about this on Anthony Watts site, but I can’t see it now.
Solar is great, for satellites.
Not just satellites; remote communication sites as well.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/northwestel-expanding-solar-power-remote-235108337.html
Sorry Pete. Yes, I see your point. But safety doesn’t enter into an EROEI consideration or even an overarching economic one. Safety is a necessary precondition for consideration at all. The question is what level of safety. That is an inherently political question, ie the political process has to decide to what level of safety the public shall be protected. And no government has ever wanted to make that kind of decision or even engage in that kind of discussion. Hence public safety is always approached in an ad hoc fashion, with tolerance for some levels of risk being far higher than others.
The problem with nuclear is that even if the actual risk is low, public and government tolerance for risk is essentially zero, whereas if we were actually going to proceed to ban things based on absolute risk, no one would ever be allowed behind the wheel of a car and like the ancients we’d still be walking everywhere.
Leonard, I have just barely enough technical expertise to understand your point but it’s still not clear that the problem can be resolved. Assume that all of the equipment you suggest is installed. You’ve driven up the capital cost significantly. And you will be increasing the outage rate for maintenance greatly. And in power generation, wind turbine maintenance is hideously expensive (and hazardous) for fairly obvious reasons. An extensive analysis would need to be done to show that the cost of power would be in any way similar to that of current design and operating practice, particularly for offshore installations.
It may well be that the current design is indeed optimized for cost, shoddy though it is.
It’s not much useful beyond earth orbit. Much further out the insolation is too low, which is why deep space probes use RTGs. Even large satellites in earth orbit occasionally used RTGs if the onboard energy demand was sufficiently high that the solar apparatus would have required so much mass that it could not be orbited.
On the surface, it all depends upon the energy requirement at remote locations. At high latitude, they’re virtually useless because of sun angle.