By Charlie Stephens
The Houston-based Energy Prospectus Group (EPG) recently published a “flash alert” titled, “Wind and Solar Will Never Lower Demand for Oil & Gas.” Reviewing a handful of energy charts, EPG argued that the energy it takes to create a wind and solar infrastructure “is more energy than they will ever provide.” The author’s conclusion: “I find it difficult to understand how anyone can be for net zero who understands a bit of math and has worked the numbers on wind and solar.”
But undergirding this analysis are a whole lot of assumptions that aren’t mentioned. Our energy circumstances are a lot more complicated than the narrow focus of the report. The analysis assumes that energy use will continue to grow, perhaps faster than the rate at which we’re adding renewable generation. They’re correct, but it would help to point out that, even after the shrinking of the economy through the Covid gambit, electricity use has continued to grow substantially. Most of the growth is in the Big Tech/IT technology and surveillance-state sectors of the economy. Even as end-use efficiencies and capacities get better, the demand growth rate outstrips those gains.
Although EPG doesn’t say so explicitly, what they are referring to is the concept of “energy return on energy invested” or EROEI—the amount of energy produced and productively used in relation to the energy used to create it and deliver it to the market. (Some folks use the term EROI to refer to the same thing, but in that version of the acronym, one is not always sure if one is doing energy accounting or financial decision-making.)
As a society, we rarely do serious system accounting—including all of the costs and benefits, examined not based on how much money which people get by incurring the costs, but on the balance of all the societal costs and benefits, and some basic physics. In business, it is good and common practice to invest in buying up key parts of the political and regulatory matrix so as to generate the “right” system outcomes. As often as not, the rationale for investing in a particular type of electric generation is not financial, or not entirely so. Massive public subsidies to just about all forms of generation technologies, if continued, will ensure that they all continue. Often this is made possible by shifting the costs, or some portion of them, onto the public and society at large.
In the end, our energy situation is driven by what we use it for, what those uses deliver to society as benefits, and at what cost to people and planet.
The EPG analysis seems to focus only on undermining the rationale behind investments in renewable energy and does not apply any of its cited principles to other primary energy sources. For instance, how much energy, and of what types, does it take to build, operate, and maintain a coal-fired power plant or a nuclear plant, over what lifetime? Those generation types have EROEIs, too, and they have been in decline for many years. Proper energy accounting includes the energy costs of acquiring raw materials, refining them, fabricating with them, using the products, maintaining the products, and dealing with the carcass or store of the products at end of life. As a case in point, there is a lot of energy spent in all of that for a nuclear power plant, with no accounting as yet as to how the waste fuel will be dealt with or how much energy will be used in the process.
Definitions Matter
“Coal” is another good example. What form of coal are we talking about? Is it anthracite (also called “hard coal” or “black coal”), which is just about played out in the U.S.? Or bituminous (the most abundant form), subbituminous, or lignite coal (which is slightly glorified dirt)? This very much matters, as the energy content per ton varies hugely. The EROEI of a coal-fired power plant varies a lot based on what type of coal you feed it, how far it has to travel (having the power plant at the mine mouth is ideal), by what means it gets to the power plant (transport by ship is a lot more efficient than transport by rail), and what one has to do to deal with the waste products. And I’m not talking about CO2 when I talk about waste—I’m talking about fly ash, which is produced by the millions of tons in the U.S. alone. Coal-fired electricity production in the U.S. has declined by more than half since 2008 when it peaked.
A chart showing U.S. electricity generation by major energy source for the period from 1950 to 2021 indicates that natural gas currently provides the largest share of electric generation. Note that since 1980, electric generation has gone from 2,300 billion kilowatt-hours to over 4,000, where it leveled off in 2008. From an energy use perspective, the American economy at home never recovered from the 2007/2008 downturn.
Solar has a bit of the same definition problem as coal. What sort of solar is EPG talking about in its analysis? Photovoltaic (PV), I presume. Solar thermal power and end uses can be very efficient and can have a good EROEI, but PV electricity production is a very different case. What’s the efficiency of the panels and inverters? The best panels we’ve seen in mass production so far are about 22% efficient, before the DC output is inverted to AC. But Boeing was producing 40% efficient panels more than 30 years ago for the space program, where weight and efficiency are critical. Somehow that technology hasn’t seen the light of day ever since. Not only were the Boeing panels efficient, but the amount of silicon required for those panels was fairly trivial, which dramatically reduces the embodied energy of the panels. I ran the numbers on the technology when I worked for the Oregon Department of Energy and found that those panels would produce enough energy to repay their embodied energy in a bit more than five years.
Then there’s the actual utility of having solar on the grid. Every day, the load on the grid goes up dramatically, just like the sun rising, and every evening the load goes back down, just like the sun. If solar is powering a big fraction of the daily load rise (to three to four times the nighttime load), storage isn’t an issue for that much capacity. If it’s attached to the grid, the load diversity on the grid is managed by the other generation sources—ones that can be turned up and down reasonably quickly during the daytime (like hydro and natural gas turbines) or run as baseload at night (like hydro or coal).
Cost-Effectiveness and Subsidies
EPG’s financial analysis seems to be focused on a lack of cost-effectiveness of investments in solar and wind power, and the need for large public subsidies and policy mandates. That’s surely true, but what about nuclear? Nuclear power has NEVER been cost-effective. If it weren’t for massive public subsidies and the public being responsible for paying for remediation of accidents (nuclear power plants are uninsurable), nuclear power never would have existed in the first place. The whole “Atoms for Peace” thing during the Eisenhower Administration was just to keep the nuclear weapons program going and supplied with enriched material. Somehow, without any promise at all of future cost-effectiveness, the public is still being tapped for massive investments in nuclear power, way beyond the value of any electricity produced. So, when will that stop?
I can add that the subsidies for the fossil fuel industries are massive, not even counting the costs they impose on society through their destruction, globally, of ecosystems, groundwater supplies, oceans, rivers, and forests. Ultimately we pay those costs, but it’s not in the fossil fuel accounting.
The first chart included in the EPG analysis, which shows an exponential rate rise in global primary energy consumption by source, is very telling. I can assure you that no human activity that has a graph like that is sustainable if it’s an activity that relies on supplies of a finite resource. Why do we think the rackets are so determined to control places like Venezuela, Iraq, and Russia? The West is getting close to being tapped out when it comes to fossil fuels, and getting at what little is left will utterly destroy most of the places where it will be mined. Fracked gas and oil are a sign of desperation and have a terrible EROEI. The cost of production is so high for fracked natural gas that blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines absolutely rescued the American natural gas industry. The reserves of natural gas and oil in North America have been in decline for many years now, because discoveries over the last 30 years have slowed to a trickle. You can’t produce oil or gas you haven’t discovered.
The countries that still have large fossil fuel resources, with relatively high EROEIs, are a target of the rackets, as they will be able to sustain the current energy paradigms for a lot longer than the countries of the West. It isn’t only important to have access to that energy; it has to be at a very low cost (preferably next to nothing), which is about what the West has paid for Iraqi and Syrian oil in recent years.
Energy-Intensive Rackets
I come around to the question of how we’re using the energy we consume, or stated perhaps more clearly, who is using it and for what purposes. More than half is being used for the violence racket and the sectors of the economy that are poisoning us. Regenerative agriculture would cut the massive amounts of energy used for farming by about three-quarters. Most of the chemical industry should simply be shut down. With nontoxic, real food and no “vaccines,” Americans would be healthy, and so all of the massive amounts of energy used by the medical and pharmaceutical rackets would go away. With these things gone, almost half of the commercial building floor space in the country would be empty and could be depowered. Before the Covid racket, the chemical industry alone was using 37% of manufacturing energy. The 22% used for oil and coal products gives you some sense of why the EROEI of gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel at the pump is not all that hot, and declining.
We can use the Department of Defense (DOD) as another example. According to Energy Information Administration (EIA) data, as of 2018, DOD was using 78% (700 trillion Btu) of all of the energy used by the federal government (900 trillion Btu). Table 1 in EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook shows that total U.S. energy consumption is 100 times this amount (around 98 quads, or quadrillion Btu). But DOD’s consumption isn’t the only consumption by the various elements of the violence racket. There is part of it in the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) nuclear energy program, part in NASA’s space violence and surveillance programs, massive amounts of server farm capacity across a host of agencies that are not DOD, and the entire industrial part of the Military-Industrial-Surveillance & “Security” Complex (MISSC). The manufacture of high-tech weapons and ordinance is very energy- and resource-intensive, and comprises a significant fraction of the industrial capacity that remains in the U.S. The manufacturing sector uses 20% of our national total.
If the transportation rackets actually used a good design for our roads, we wouldn’t need to rebuild them every seven or eight years, saving an immense amount of fossil fuels and wear-and-tear on our vehicles. It would save about a quad of annual energy use per year. The parts of our transportation infrastructure that are transporting toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and industrial agriculture commodities would largely go away, too.
Absent the power use that degrades the health of people and planet and destroys whole countries and societies, and absent the rapidly growing demand of the global control grid, we wouldn’t need any more electric generation capacity for quite a while. And if these sources of death, destruction, disease, and destitution aren’t dealt with soon, where we get our power from will be among the least of our concerns.
The international crime syndicate that has been directing all of this in the West accumulates immense wealth and power using all of these societal activities—these rackets that they control—and they decided long ago that either a lot of humans would have to die or they would have to radically alter their predatory economic system, doing away with most of it. They chose to work on killing us all off and keeping their rackets. To the extreme consternation of the Club of Rome, modeling that we did back in 1970–1971 showed that Earth could support over eight billion people with the standard of living of middle-class Brazil at the time, but not if the rackets continued. Population was never the problem. It was always the rackets—the parasite class.
Related at the Solari Report:
A 21st-Century Approach to Energy with Charlie Stephens, Part I
A 21st-Century Approach to Energy with Charlie Stephens, Part II
A 21st-Century Approach to Energy, Part III – What Can I Do? with Charlie Stephens
A 21st-Century Approach to Energy: Reading List
