[p2p-research] Fwd with title: the net energy factor and the renewables transition

Mon Jan 11 16:09:17 CET 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 10:08 PM
Subject:
To: Peer-To-Peer Research List <p2presearch at listcultures.org>
Cc: Jeff Vail <jsvail at gmail.com>

 Dear Jeff,

if you read this announcement here:
http://www.postcarbon.org/report/44377-searching-for-a-miracle
and then Paul's reaction below, what do you think?

I would like to post an eventual reaction to the p2p blog,

Michel

(my own feeling is that Paul's faith in simple extrapolation is hard to take
seriously)

Topic: the net energy factor and the renewables
transition<http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/t/407d33c7c09ea076>

   "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> Jan 10 11:18AM
-0500 ^<http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&view=js&name=js&ver=qEnx5VtnzxI.en.&am=!5GA6FQbNn1G5A3Gi0fgGIitGXn19dknb4PNa9BCwli5tNQ#1261d397edb4379a_digest_top>

   Michel-

   As I've said before, if you look at the exponential growth of renewables,
   in
   twenty to thirty years we will be completely running off renewables. This

   report is like a report in the 1980s saying there is no way that most
   people
   will own cell phones because only about a million people a year are
   buying
   cell phones and it would take seven thousand years for everyone to get a
   cell phone at that rate. But now half the Earth's population does have
   cell
   phones? What happened? Exponential growth.

   If you look at crash plans to move to renewables for the USA they are
   only a
   few hundred billion dollars, or less than one years US defense budget, to

   bring the USA over to entirely renewables. Example:
   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
   So, again, even without exponential growth, that report is wrong.

   So, that report is alarmist and misguided, and also shows, once again,
   the
   comment by Einstein (and others) that humans have a lot of trouble
   understanding exponential growth. It also shows a misunderstanding of the

   scale of our economy and government to deal with problems once they are
   deemed worth addressing.

   On energy payback, both state-of-the-art windmills and state-of-the art
   solar panels have energy payback in under two years; for windmills well
   sited I recall reading the energy payback may be in a matter of months.
   Exampleh quoting research from 1993 and things have gotten better since:
   http://www.wind-works.org/articles/EnergyBalanceofWindTurbines.html
   "The results of the three studies are comparable: medium-sized wind
   turbines
   installed in areas with commercially usable wind resources will pay for
   themselves easily within one year. At 7 m/s (16 mph) sites, like those on

   the North Sea coast or in California's mountain passes, turbines will
   return
   their energy content in 3-5 months, and at sites typical of North
   America's
   Great Plains in 4-6 months. Even at low wind sites, the turbines will pay

   for themselves in less than one year. As expected, much of the energy
   used
   to manufacture the turbine is represented by the rotor and nacelle. But
   more
   than one-third of the total energy consumed by the wind turbine is
   represented by the concrete foundation and tower."

   Even if people suggested those claims were grossly exaggerated, an energy

   payback time of even ten times longer for wind would still be only a few
   years if the turbine is well sited. The USA has enough good wind sites to

   supply all its energy just from wind, at far less environmental damage
   overall than from coal (how many birds and bats are killed by the
   pollution
   from coal mining?)

   I looked at that report which discusses wind on page 31, and there they
   say
   the EROI for wind in the USA is eighteen to one (meaning you get almost
   twenty times more energy back than you put in, which would mean for
   something with a thirty year lifetime a payback in a year an a half). The
   PV
   packback in that report is very out-of-date too, by the way (they say
   3.75
   to 10, when it now may be around 60 for some modern thin-film systems).
   They
   admit solar thermal EROI is likely to be high, and talk about how good
   passive solar is. How they can say all that and then dismiss the
   exponential
   changes to that shows a huge disconnect on the analysis side. On page 58
   they just dismiss renewables as too expensive and of limited growth
   potential with no evidence or substantial analysis, and likewise they
   cite
   "intermittency" like it renders the technologies useless without the
   least
   bit of exploration of energy storage techniques that exist or are under
   development. I have not read the whole report, just glanced at those
   pages,
   and glancing at the next section on energy storage that looks woefully
   incomplete, but I've looked at many like it and they make similar serious

   underestimates for long term prospects. It's tiring to waste so much time
   on
   naysayers when so many people have spent so much time developing positive

   alternatives. Anyway, I could say a lot more but other things to do.

   Like many people, the people who wrote that report do not seem to
   understand
   exponential growth or the scale of the economy -- realizing that we have
   big
   problems but ignoring how there are vast capacities to deal with the
   problems (if society supports solutions). So is that report a result of a

   profit-making agenda, a wallowing in fear, or just plain ignorance even
   in
   the face of claiming to study things? Sometimes such "research" is often
   coupled with exhortations to reduce populations, and there is often a
   mushy
   set of thinking related to racism and classism in there too. Again, as
   I've
   pointed out before, there is rooms for quadrillions of humans in the
   solar
   system.

   Yet, as I've also said before, reports like these and other social issues

   may well doom us, because they reinforce scarcity-thinking, and we now
   have
   post-scarcity technologies, including ironically nuclear missiles, for
   scarcity-minded people to use to fight over oil and land (ironic when
   nuclear energy and rocketry could get us unlimited power and land, not
   that
   I'm a big nuclear fan). But there is not technical reason we can't make
   Space Ship Earth work for everyone, in part because it's not really a
   self-contained space ship because it is an open system getting energy
   from
   the sun, has vast thermal reserves, and we can leave it to build cities
   and
   habitats in space.

   What is doubly ironic is that people like those making the report are
   likely
   getting financial support to push that agenda to close down the future of

   humanity. Does the main author of that report make a lot of money
   pandering
   to people's fears rather than trying to offer better solutions? I have a
   lot
   more respect for Lester Brown who offers workable ideas (even if he too
   misses some of exponential growth or emerging ideas):
   "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization"
   http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents

   You can't make useful predictions about where we will be at the end of
   the
   21st century while ignoring basic things like exponential growth, let
   alone
   the potential of existing off-the-shelf-technology if widely deployed.

   --Paul Fernhout
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/
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