Would anyone sane buy a car costing some 10 times the normal price to buy and run, that can only work one day in six, when you never know which day that might be ? And then insist that its technology is the only way to power a whole developed economy.
I wish I could say I was surprised by the fact that a 'senior electricity' analyst had not heard about EROEI, but I'm not. I've had dealings with renewable energy companies, planning authorities and planning inspectors appointed by the Secretary of State and none have demonstrated any knowledge of EROEI. It is a shameful indictment of the state of the country (government, civil service, education) that we have begun, and are about to accelerate along a path that leads to the impoverishment of society and dislocation from all the benefits of high EROEI energy (fossil fuels, nuclear power) all in the name of chasing the chimera of Net Zero. There is no climate crisis that demands we throw ourselves over the EROEI cliff through diktat of governments that clearly have little, or no true understanding of the issues involved.
Don't get suckered in by their talk about achieving "Net Zero". Their "Net Zero" is a carbon trading scam whose only purpose is to transfer vast amounts of wealth from the Middle Class in the West to the $billionaire class of wealthy investors. It really does almost nothing to actually reduce emissions.
I think they will try their best to implement Demand Side Response (aka energy rationing) to the maximum extent before blackouts. But they were already warning of blackouts last winter. Since then they have closed some of the remaining coal plants and some of the remaining nukes are reaching end of life. We're on a knife-edge.
Demand side response is not advancing fast enough. It will be very difficult. You need Smart everything, and getting it linked, and staying linked, is a twenty year endeavor. Not to mention they have done nothing to sell it to the public.
National Grid have been upselling DFS, claiming it is a solution they found down the back of a sofa (!) Enough electricity for 10 million homes they claim - which is of course utter b*ll*cks. The best they achieved was 294MW in one half-hour period, paying up to £6,000/MWh to facilitators to organise and bribe consumers to take part. That was probably an exaggeration as the scheme was open to being gamed, and obviously was. They have now designed features to incorporate into future versions to try to prevent that.
Last yrs winter was benign which helped massively. I doubt we will get away with that this yr. Given that everything is blamed on fossil fuels (such as the shocking cost of electricity) I don't have the same level of optimism as you. The policy makers and industry grifters will double down, they are in way too deep (when was the last time you heard a politician apologise?). I predict yrs of blackouts which will only stop when a Sri Lanka type uprising happens. Covid proved we are for more compliant and deferential to the Government than they ever imagined. We're done😢
Weather dependent means unreliable and horridly expensive as either there is costly back up by fossil sources or those on the grid give up power. Remember who drove us off the energy cliff.)
Jul 16, 2023·edited Jul 16, 2023Liked by David Turver
Doing the calculation with pumped hydro is not relevant. Someone needs to do the EROI calculation for the Wind/Solar plan as it exists today. And that is battery & green hydrogen for storage. Green H2 for process heat. Heat pumps for building heat. And long distance, poorly loaded transmission, to improve the Capacity Factor of the Solar/Wind energy supply. And a whole lot of Overbuild due to seasonal variation. The hydrogen will presumably use fuel cells for electricity production.
And then there is the EROI for wind/solar/storage/hydrogen for transportation applications.
I suspect if you do a complete EROI calculation for those REAL WORLD power grids, it will be around 1:1. Even worse in many regions.
And Charles Hall puts the minimum EROI for a modern industrial civilization with benefits like Arts & Culture, Pensions, Health Care, Education, Military, Legal System at 14:1.
And that 14:1 is going to be made even higher by all the chicanery going on in Government now. i.e.:
Stupid destructive endless wars
Creating all kinds of overpaid less-than-worthless jobs like Offices of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
ESG mandates
Endless scam projects like Solar Roadways
Casino Capitalism financial scams
Carbon Trading scams, i.e. Net Zero
Plandemic scams i.e. lockdowns, economic blockades
Agrofuel scams
Scams waste energy & resources. 14:1 EROI isn't going to be enough.
You make some good points. I think the Government should fund research on whole system EROEI and update it each year.
And yes, you are probably right that the real world EROEI of the system proposed by NG ESO is lower than I calculated for the reasons you mentioned. I did hint as much in the article.
Strictly you probably need buffering for nuclear, as it is not easy to fix for it to load follow at grid scale. Indeed, Wylfa was supported by Dinorwig pumped storage as well as Anglesey Aluminium which gave it a large baseload customer. If you examine what the French actually do you find that intra day load following is performed by hydro and gas and exports, with seasonal flex in nuclear fixed by scheduling maintenance and refuelling for low demand seasons in normal circumstances. Nuclear flex on shorter timescales is costly, which doesn't matter in a nuclear sub, but is crucial for a grid.
LCOE is of course a useless metric when considering a grid. Any technology has significant cost variation depending on the mode of use. CCGT becomes inefficient when ramped and cycled frequently. Coal and nuclear ditto. Hydro costs depend on utilisation factors. Wind and solar exotics get progressively worse as capacity is added to pay for the added grid investment, stabilisation and curtailment, backup and perhaps storage.
You can really only look at an integrated grid and measure its cost in energy input and money in a range of situations: summer, winter, higher and lower demand and temperatures, wind speeds, commodity prices etc. and then consider variations in capacity provision to see which offer better or worse solutions.
I think the graph is useful, but awkward and confusing.
How about clarifying/estimating all costs - mining, materials, transport, footprint, construction, transmission, storage, waste disposal, facility/materials lifespan, and decommissioning. With this data calculate "true cost" of energy produced.
Energy sources could then be compared in a more apples to apples manner.
Complicated - yes! But a detailed/ inclusive approach would provide a much more accurate and relevant picture. The goal being to calculate and compare the cost of all energy sources, rather than a graph that leaves most of us scratching are heads. If this has already been done, please share source/reference.
EROEI is about energy return on energy invested. Not costs. Of course the lower the EROEI, the likelihood is the costs are higher.
I think what you are describing is Levelised Cost of Energy. That is used by many, including the national grid to help design the grid. Trouble is, it doesn't include the cost of mitigating intermittency (backup and/or storage), and aside from nuclear, doesn't include the cost of decommissioning.
David, I would like, if I may, to place EROEI in its historical context because similar work had been undertaken for some time previously, going back at least as far as the late 1970s as I show below (see Appendix 1). This is important in the current context where, throughout much of the Western world, large subsidies have been given to the PRESENT generation of renewables technologies over many years when a simple application of energy analysis (described below) would have suggested at the outset that this policy was most unwise on both economic and engineering/energy grounds. Did we forget about energy analysis, or did climate panic and related political considerations cloud our judgement?
The work by Weissbach et al. on EROEI dates from only about a decade ago (2013). However, as may be seen in a standard UK undergraduate engineering text on thermodynamics [Ref. 1], a form of energy accounting, termed ‘energy analysis’, was introduced long ago so as to avoid building energy generation plant which would consume almost as much energy in its construction as would be produced by that plant in its lifetime.
Further details are given just below (Appendix 1) which quotes from [Ref. 1], namely the textbook by Rogers and Mayhew.
APPENDIX 1: Low temperature power cycles [from Ref. 1]
“In this section we will consider vapour power plant for electricity generation which make use of low-temperature sources such as waste heat from a factory process … Because of the small temperature drop available … the cycle efficiency will be low. This is not serious, however, because the ‘fuel’ is free. The cost of electricity generated by such plant will depend on the capital cost, the effective life of the plant (i.e. the period over which the capital cost must be written off), and the maintenance cost. A low efficiency does imply large components for a given power output, and hence inevitably a high capital cost.”
“… Like many proposals for utilising renewable sources for electricity generation, such as solar, wind, tidal and wave energy, the capital and maintenance costs turn out to be too large for widespread adoption at present [i.e. circa 1992]. Although the ‘fuel’ costs nothing, such schemes are likely to remain uneconomic as long as plentiful supplies of traditional fuels exist … One should remember, however, that energy sources of low concentration or ‘space density’, as the renewable sources tend to be, inevitably entail the use of very large plant, and sheer size can have its own undesirable effects upon the environment ...”
“In assessing implications of ‘low-density’ power plant, it must also be borne in mind that large quantities of material would be necessary for the construction of such plant, and engineering materials are energy intensive; that is, their production involves a large expenditure of energy. There is normally little point in proposing power plant which use up nearly as much energy in their construction as will be produced in the lifetime of the plant. A form of energy accounting , called energy analysis, has been introduced as a supplement to economic analysis to make sure that this kind of mistake is avoided. A brief commentary on energy analysis can be found in Ref. 40.”
The ref. 40 cited by Rogers & Mayhew is this:-
G F C Rogers, ‘Limitations and uses of energy analysis’, Chartered Mechanical Engineer, September 1977, pages 48 – 51.
Would anyone sane buy a car costing some 10 times the normal price to buy and run, that can only work one day in six, when you never know which day that might be ? And then insist that its technology is the only way to power a whole developed economy.
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/a-few-graphs-say-it-all-for-renewables/
I found this comment a while back from Gail Tverberg interesting on the issue of EROEI and Solar as an example.
EROEI Calculations for Solar PV Are Misleading- here is the linkhttps://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/12/21/eroei-calculations-for-solar-pv-are-misleading/
I wish I could say I was surprised by the fact that a 'senior electricity' analyst had not heard about EROEI, but I'm not. I've had dealings with renewable energy companies, planning authorities and planning inspectors appointed by the Secretary of State and none have demonstrated any knowledge of EROEI. It is a shameful indictment of the state of the country (government, civil service, education) that we have begun, and are about to accelerate along a path that leads to the impoverishment of society and dislocation from all the benefits of high EROEI energy (fossil fuels, nuclear power) all in the name of chasing the chimera of Net Zero. There is no climate crisis that demands we throw ourselves over the EROEI cliff through diktat of governments that clearly have little, or no true understanding of the issues involved.
Don't get suckered in by their talk about achieving "Net Zero". Their "Net Zero" is a carbon trading scam whose only purpose is to transfer vast amounts of wealth from the Middle Class in the West to the $billionaire class of wealthy investors. It really does almost nothing to actually reduce emissions.
How long do you think it will be until the first power cuts in the UK? That will be the wake-up call for these issues to get exposure.
I think they will try their best to implement Demand Side Response (aka energy rationing) to the maximum extent before blackouts. But they were already warning of blackouts last winter. Since then they have closed some of the remaining coal plants and some of the remaining nukes are reaching end of life. We're on a knife-edge.
Demand side response is not advancing fast enough. It will be very difficult. You need Smart everything, and getting it linked, and staying linked, is a twenty year endeavor. Not to mention they have done nothing to sell it to the public.
National Grid have been upselling DFS, claiming it is a solution they found down the back of a sofa (!) Enough electricity for 10 million homes they claim - which is of course utter b*ll*cks. The best they achieved was 294MW in one half-hour period, paying up to £6,000/MWh to facilitators to organise and bribe consumers to take part. That was probably an exaggeration as the scheme was open to being gamed, and obviously was. They have now designed features to incorporate into future versions to try to prevent that.
Last yrs winter was benign which helped massively. I doubt we will get away with that this yr. Given that everything is blamed on fossil fuels (such as the shocking cost of electricity) I don't have the same level of optimism as you. The policy makers and industry grifters will double down, they are in way too deep (when was the last time you heard a politician apologise?). I predict yrs of blackouts which will only stop when a Sri Lanka type uprising happens. Covid proved we are for more compliant and deferential to the Government than they ever imagined. We're done😢
Weather dependent means unreliable and horridly expensive as either there is costly back up by fossil sources or those on the grid give up power. Remember who drove us off the energy cliff.)
Doing the calculation with pumped hydro is not relevant. Someone needs to do the EROI calculation for the Wind/Solar plan as it exists today. And that is battery & green hydrogen for storage. Green H2 for process heat. Heat pumps for building heat. And long distance, poorly loaded transmission, to improve the Capacity Factor of the Solar/Wind energy supply. And a whole lot of Overbuild due to seasonal variation. The hydrogen will presumably use fuel cells for electricity production.
And then there is the EROI for wind/solar/storage/hydrogen for transportation applications.
I suspect if you do a complete EROI calculation for those REAL WORLD power grids, it will be around 1:1. Even worse in many regions.
And Charles Hall puts the minimum EROI for a modern industrial civilization with benefits like Arts & Culture, Pensions, Health Care, Education, Military, Legal System at 14:1.
And that 14:1 is going to be made even higher by all the chicanery going on in Government now. i.e.:
Stupid destructive endless wars
Creating all kinds of overpaid less-than-worthless jobs like Offices of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
ESG mandates
Endless scam projects like Solar Roadways
Casino Capitalism financial scams
Carbon Trading scams, i.e. Net Zero
Plandemic scams i.e. lockdowns, economic blockades
Agrofuel scams
Scams waste energy & resources. 14:1 EROI isn't going to be enough.
You make some good points. I think the Government should fund research on whole system EROEI and update it each year.
And yes, you are probably right that the real world EROEI of the system proposed by NG ESO is lower than I calculated for the reasons you mentioned. I did hint as much in the article.
What’s the rest of Europe looking like regards EROEI?
I haven't done the calculations. But I imagine France is doing quite well. Germany, not so much.
Somebody better solve the storage problem, fast.
Better to design the system using proven technologies that don't require as yet uninvented storage.
Seems the whole movement is built on futures and speculation.
Strictly you probably need buffering for nuclear, as it is not easy to fix for it to load follow at grid scale. Indeed, Wylfa was supported by Dinorwig pumped storage as well as Anglesey Aluminium which gave it a large baseload customer. If you examine what the French actually do you find that intra day load following is performed by hydro and gas and exports, with seasonal flex in nuclear fixed by scheduling maintenance and refuelling for low demand seasons in normal circumstances. Nuclear flex on shorter timescales is costly, which doesn't matter in a nuclear sub, but is crucial for a grid.
LCOE is of course a useless metric when considering a grid. Any technology has significant cost variation depending on the mode of use. CCGT becomes inefficient when ramped and cycled frequently. Coal and nuclear ditto. Hydro costs depend on utilisation factors. Wind and solar exotics get progressively worse as capacity is added to pay for the added grid investment, stabilisation and curtailment, backup and perhaps storage.
You can really only look at an integrated grid and measure its cost in energy input and money in a range of situations: summer, winter, higher and lower demand and temperatures, wind speeds, commodity prices etc. and then consider variations in capacity provision to see which offer better or worse solutions.
I think the graph is useful, but awkward and confusing.
How about clarifying/estimating all costs - mining, materials, transport, footprint, construction, transmission, storage, waste disposal, facility/materials lifespan, and decommissioning. With this data calculate "true cost" of energy produced.
Energy sources could then be compared in a more apples to apples manner.
Complicated - yes! But a detailed/ inclusive approach would provide a much more accurate and relevant picture. The goal being to calculate and compare the cost of all energy sources, rather than a graph that leaves most of us scratching are heads. If this has already been done, please share source/reference.
EROEI is about energy return on energy invested. Not costs. Of course the lower the EROEI, the likelihood is the costs are higher.
I think what you are describing is Levelised Cost of Energy. That is used by many, including the national grid to help design the grid. Trouble is, it doesn't include the cost of mitigating intermittency (backup and/or storage), and aside from nuclear, doesn't include the cost of decommissioning.
The Government does that already:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-generation-costs-2023
Discussed the flaws here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/offshore-wind-new-big-lie
Mr Turver - I hope you enjoy my reaction to your essay, linked here: https://open.substack.com/pub/joelelorentzen/p/a-climate-of-skepticism?r=1p5p1m&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Thanks.
Thanks.
David, I would like, if I may, to place EROEI in its historical context because similar work had been undertaken for some time previously, going back at least as far as the late 1970s as I show below (see Appendix 1). This is important in the current context where, throughout much of the Western world, large subsidies have been given to the PRESENT generation of renewables technologies over many years when a simple application of energy analysis (described below) would have suggested at the outset that this policy was most unwise on both economic and engineering/energy grounds. Did we forget about energy analysis, or did climate panic and related political considerations cloud our judgement?
The work by Weissbach et al. on EROEI dates from only about a decade ago (2013). However, as may be seen in a standard UK undergraduate engineering text on thermodynamics [Ref. 1], a form of energy accounting, termed ‘energy analysis’, was introduced long ago so as to avoid building energy generation plant which would consume almost as much energy in its construction as would be produced by that plant in its lifetime.
Further details are given just below (Appendix 1) which quotes from [Ref. 1], namely the textbook by Rogers and Mayhew.
APPENDIX 1: Low temperature power cycles [from Ref. 1]
“In this section we will consider vapour power plant for electricity generation which make use of low-temperature sources such as waste heat from a factory process … Because of the small temperature drop available … the cycle efficiency will be low. This is not serious, however, because the ‘fuel’ is free. The cost of electricity generated by such plant will depend on the capital cost, the effective life of the plant (i.e. the period over which the capital cost must be written off), and the maintenance cost. A low efficiency does imply large components for a given power output, and hence inevitably a high capital cost.”
“… Like many proposals for utilising renewable sources for electricity generation, such as solar, wind, tidal and wave energy, the capital and maintenance costs turn out to be too large for widespread adoption at present [i.e. circa 1992]. Although the ‘fuel’ costs nothing, such schemes are likely to remain uneconomic as long as plentiful supplies of traditional fuels exist … One should remember, however, that energy sources of low concentration or ‘space density’, as the renewable sources tend to be, inevitably entail the use of very large plant, and sheer size can have its own undesirable effects upon the environment ...”
“In assessing implications of ‘low-density’ power plant, it must also be borne in mind that large quantities of material would be necessary for the construction of such plant, and engineering materials are energy intensive; that is, their production involves a large expenditure of energy. There is normally little point in proposing power plant which use up nearly as much energy in their construction as will be produced in the lifetime of the plant. A form of energy accounting , called energy analysis, has been introduced as a supplement to economic analysis to make sure that this kind of mistake is avoided. A brief commentary on energy analysis can be found in Ref. 40.”
The ref. 40 cited by Rogers & Mayhew is this:-
G F C Rogers, ‘Limitations and uses of energy analysis’, Chartered Mechanical Engineer, September 1977, pages 48 – 51.
Reference
1. Rogers & Mayhew, ‘Engineering Thermodynamics Work & Heat Transfer’, Prentice Hall, 4th ed., 1992.
Regards, John Cullen.