It costs less energy to get fossil fuels, but we can't use them as efficiently.

It doesn't take a lot of energy to dig up coal or pump oil from the ground. In contrast, most renewable sources of energy involve obtaining and refining resources, sophisticated manufacturing, and installation. So, at first glance, when it comes to the energy used to get more energy—the energy return on investment—fossil fuels seem like a clear winner. That has led some to argue that transitioning to renewables will create an overall drop in net energy production, which nobody is interested in seeing.

A new study by researchers at the UK's University of Leeds, however, suggests that this isn't a concern at all—in most countries, renewables already produce more net energy than the fossil fuels they're displacing. The key to understanding why is that it's much easier to do useful things with electricity than it is with a hunk of coal or a glob of crude oil. //

Focusing on utility makes a substantial difference. Using the 2020 data, the final, delivered-to-end-user EROI of fossil fuels is quite good, at approximately 8.5, meaning you get about 8.5 units of energy out for every one you invest. (This is averaged across all fuels and uses.) Once you try to do something useful with it, however, it drops dramatically so that the useful-stage EROI is only about 3.5. Which, to be clear, is bad—you want to be getting as much useful energy as possible for every unit of energy you put into things.

Different fuels have very different profiles, however. Natural gas has the highest useful-stage EROI at 9.5, coal is at 7.2, and oil products are only 2, meaning we only get about twice as much energy out of gasoline as we put into producing and using it. Most of these values have been largely unchanged for the past 50 years except for natural gas, which has seen a dramatic drop in the EROI of getting it ready to use (possibly due to the energy costs of fracking—the trend is most notable in the 1980s), and a smaller drop in useful-stage EROI.

A large contributor to these values is how these fuels are put to use. For example, the useful-stage EROI for natural gas in heating buildings is about 12, meaning it can be used reasonably efficiently. The value for heating with oil products is only about 5. Oil products used in road and rail propulsion are also terrible, being just above 2 for rail travel and under 2 for roads.

Renewable energy, in this analysis, is focused on things like wind and solar, which deliver electrons to the grid (things like renewable production of methane are pretty minor at this point). Those can be used for things like heating, rail and road transit, and other uses performed by fossil fuels. Many of these uses are extremely efficient—things like heat pumps and electric motors are much better at turning energy into utility than their fossil fuel equivalents. //

chekk Smack-Fu Master, in training
4y
47
A bit confused by the "Energy efficiency and utility" section:

final-stage EROIs, which tracked the energy used to get a unit of energy to where it's ready for use—so, all the energetic costs of extraction, processing, and delivery
and:
The one thing this doesn't include is the energy cost of the infrastructure needed to extract fossil fuels

What about the energy cost of the infrastructures for processing and delivery? Are those included or not?
To put it a different way, what does "all the energetic costs" actually mean? //

SnoopCatt Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
7m
524
Subscriptor
While the energetic cost of getting energy in the hands of people in a form that's ready for use is a "useful" metric, I think we also need to consider the cost of being able to use energy when we need to. For renewables, this means factoring the cost of batteries or other energy storage mechanisms. //

kevbo Seniorius Lurkius
5y
6
Subscriptor++
I'm looking at the paper: I'm not seeing anything about end-of-life disposal costs. That's one of the "renewable feels like it is more expensive" points: turbine blades and toxic solar panels and batteries need to be disposed of. Of course, it doesn't seem to account for disposing traditional power plants either. I don't know what that end of life cost does to this kind of calculation. I wish it was covered. //

jdbosma Seniorius Lurkius
13y
12
Subscriptor++
It's not clear that this study correctly accounts for the difference between work and heat.
Fossil fuels produce heat. Solar-thermal renewables do too, but photovoltaics and wind produce work (electricity).
Heat is energy that moves from one location to another only under the influence of a termperature difference. Work is energy that can (theoretically) be converted to lifting a weight in a gravitational field, among other useful tasks.
Both work and and heat are energy, i.e. measured in Joules. To convert heat to work is possible, using a heat engine, but under typical conditions no more than about 40% of the heat can be converted to work. The theoretical upper limit on heat engine efficiency is provided by the Carnot relation - achievable implementations always fall short of the maximum.
Direct generation of work energy, as performed by photovoltaics and wind power, is more flexible and in most cases preferable to generation of heat. For one thing, work as electrical power is readily transported over long distances by wire. Work can readily be converted to heat with no loss of energy. When the desired output involves moving heat, a unit of work can sometimes move several times its energy value of heat - this principle is applied in heat pumps for space heating.
It does not make sense to compare the EROI for the heating value of fossil fuels against the electrical value of wind power, since a Joule of work is worth roughly 3x a Joule of heat in some applications, and a Joule of work can always be converted to a Joule of heat when that is desired.
To be most useful, the study should separately compare the EROIs for processes where the output is heat vs. work. //

pete.d Ars Centurion
6y
259
Subscriptor
The article doesn't mention nuclear at all. Did the researchers even consider that energy source, or were they strictly comparing fossil fuels with renewables?

There has been a lot of debate, especially lately, regarding whether nuclear energy is in fact cost-competitive with renewables, even ignoring the lengthy construction times involved. It would've been really interesting to see where nuclear fit into this analysis.

U.S. electricity generation from wind turbines decreased for the first time since the mid-1990s in 2023 despite the addition of 6.2 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity last year. Data from our Power Plant Operations Report show that U.S. wind generation in 2023 totaled 425,235 gigawatthours (GWh), 2.1% less than the 434,297 GWh generated in 2022.

U.S. wind capacity increased steadily over the last several years, more than tripling from 47.0 GW in 2010 to 147.5 GW at the end of 2023. Electricity generation from wind turbines also grew steadily, at a similar rate to capacity, until 2023. Last year, the average utilization rate, or capacity factor, of the wind turbine fleet fell to an eight-year low of 33.5% (compared with 35.9% in 2022, the all-time high). //

anon-onh5
7 hours ago
I've driven across the west at night and I have a question that I've never seen addressed. People talk about light pollution all the time but no one mentioned that the NOTAM lights on these wind farms practically turns the night into day (granted reddish day but still day). I would truly hate to try to sleep anywhere near them. Now what does this do to the lifestyle and habits of the local wildlife? I'm not much of a naturalist but don't prey animals get a bit of a break on dark nights? Well there are no such things as dark nights on a windmill farm. So if the prey animals leave, there go the predators. And if the prey animals leave, there goes your ground cover also because it's the rodents and birds that scatter seeds. Am I right?

Toronto-based Hydrostor Inc. is one of the businesses developing long-duration energy storage that has moved beyond lab scale and is now focusing on building big things. The company makes systems that store energy underground in the form of compressed air, which can be released to produce electricity for eight hours or longer. //

Unlike some other long-duration storage companies, Hydrostor has proven its technology. The company has operated a small, 1.75-megawatt plant in Goderich, Ontario, since 2019, which can run for about six hours at a time. Compressed-air storage existed before Hydrostor—plants in Germany and Alabama have been around for decades and use variations on this approach.

Hydrostor’s system uses a supersize air compressor that ideally would run on renewable electricity. The system draws air from the environment, compressing it and moving it through a pipe into a cavern more than 1,000 feet underground. The process of compressing the air produces heat, and the system extracts heat from the air and stores it above ground for reuse. As the air goes underground, it displaces water from the cavern up a shaft into a reservoir.

When it’s time to discharge energy, the system releases water into the cavern, forcing the air to the surface. The air then mixes with heat that the plant stored when the air was compressing, and this hot, dense air passes through a turbine to make electricity.

Under the new plan, however, all such habitats would be categorically off-limits as soon as it is discovered that the land is occupied by a listed species. Any potential impacts to endangered species habitats that are discovered in the course of site surveys (usually after millions of dollars have already been expended on the project application) would kill the project entirely.

The permitting risk, already prohibitive for many new projects, could put whole states beyond the reach of all but the most hardy (or foolish) developers. The solar energy areas under the new solar plan overlap substantially with areas containing multiple endangered and threatened species. This endangered species exclusion alone would eliminate virtually all new solar development in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, which lead the nation in solar capacity per acre. //

Even for the 14% of BLM land left available for solar project development after all these exclusions, the new plan imposes onerous permitting requirements. These include some 600 mandatory design elements.

Some of these verge on the comical. BLM proposes a blanket prohibition on “grading” (leveling out land), which is indispensable for access roads, utility-scale batteries, transmission poles, and construction staging. The plan also prohibits development within 200 feet of ephemeral streams (those that come into existence, for example, after heavy rainfall, and then go away) and requires 75% residual vegetation around the development.

These requirements will be impossible to meet economically for many projects, and even where possible, would significantly expand the amount of land required per unit of electricity, thus defeating the goal of conservation. //

Most surprisingly, the new plan does not address any of the major problems that years of experience have revealed in the permitting process for solar and other energy projects on BLM land. On the contrary, it makes the permitting challenges even worse for existing projects applications, which are not “grandfathered” in any respect. Many solar project applications already in process will have to start over, and many of those applicants will prefer to cut their losses instead.

Many projects’ applications have been pending for years, and companies have already negotiated operational and power-purchase agreements of various kinds and would be bankrupted by having to start over.

This demonstrates a problem with heavily regulated sectors: Officials feel all too free to “move the goal posts” with little concern for the enormous losses they are causing developers and investors and little understanding that these are social losses that impact everybody.

For Americans to avoid a prolonged period of energy scarcity in the high-demand decade ahead, the nation will require a significant expansion in electricity generation. The bulk of that will need to come from nuclear and fossil sources, which are significantly more abundant, “energy dense,” and reliable than renewable sources like solar and wind. //

The new solar plan is being promoted as a partial solution, but even a brief review shows clearly that it will only make those problems worse. The plan is a clear sellout to left-wing environmentalists. And it shows that while those environmentalists hate fossil fuels, they don’t particularly love renewable energy—or energy of any kind.

They mean to save the planet for what they think is the planet’s sake, not for our sake. And if in the process they plunge the world into energy scarcity—a much grimmer fate than all the doomsday climate scenarios put together—in their minds, that’s just too bad for us.

A new energy bill passed by the Florida legislature, which DeSantis is certain to sign, bans offshore wind turbines and prioritizes reliable, affordable electricity over utopian renewable fantasies. According to experts at the Energy Research Institute, this bold move represents a reasoned pushback against the climate activist agenda that has destabilized power grids across America. //

Institute for Energy Research
@IERenergy
·
Follow
Texas and California produce more renewable energy than all other states, but they also lead the nation in power outages.
instituteforenergyresearch.org
https://t.co/2c8kn8dGX8
As Renewable Energy Increases in the Generation Mix, Power Outages Grow
3:10 PM · Mar 25, 2024

A microgrid is a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources that acts as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. It can connect and disconnect from the grid to operate in grid-connected or island mode. Microgrids can improve customer reliability and resilience to grid disturbances.

Advanced microgrids enable local power generation assets—including traditional generators, renewables, and storage—to keep the local grid running even when the larger grid experiences interruptions or, for remote areas, where there is no connection to the larger grid. In addition, advanced microgrids allow local assets to work together to save costs, extend duration of energy supplies, and produce revenue via market participation.

The development of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Microgrid Program Strategy started around December 2020. The purpose was to define strategic research and development (R&D) areas for the DOE Office of Electricity (OE) Microgrids R&D (MGRD) Program to support its vision and accomplish its goals.

Now we see that in Africa, the great apes are endangered by climate change; it's not like you might think, these apes are endangered by the mining of raw materials for electric vehicle batteries, which is destroying their habitat.

Mining companies hunting critical minerals could wipe out more than a third of Africa’s remaining great apes, a new study has found. //

Mining booms — whether for coal or cobalt — tend to be staggeringly destructive processes: A feedback loop of new roads pushed into the forest, which draw in job-seeking colonists, who further clear habitat.

This dynamic is particularly stark in Africa, where some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium lie beneath the soil — and nearly half a million great apes live in the forests above.

Nika4h @nikit2h
·
Replying to @crit_architect
A hailstorm this month has damaged thousands of solar panels at the 350-MW Fighting Jays Solar Farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, “Golf ball”-sized hail fell in the area on March 15, and aerial footage captured from a helicopter offered a glimpse at the extent of the damage
11:05 PM · Mar 26, 2024 //

Corey Thompson @Roughneck2real
·
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.

Who pays to fix this green energy? @StateFarm? @FarmBureau? @Allstate?

Or you the taxpayer?

3:06 PM · Mar 25, 2024 //

Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy watchdog group Power the Future, was even more emphatic about the need to proceed carefully with solar power:

"There's this enormous shell game happening by the Biden administration, by the environmental left, presenting wind and solar as perfectly green, clean, and carbon-neutral," Turner told Fox News Digital. "They use all of these buzzwords. But they're none of that and they also have enormous drawbacks. And it's doing the American people a great disservice to obfuscate these very obvious shortcomings."

He noted that, because solar panels are largely manufactured in China, the destruction of solar farms could be leveraged in geopolitical disputes between the U.S. and China.

"Why would we expect them to race to our aid when our grid is down nationwide, and they are the ones holding the goods that we need to get back up?" Turner said.

The 4,000-acre solar farm called Fighting J's near [Needville, Texas] took a beating during hailstorms on March 16.

"My concern is the hail damage that came through and busted these panels we now have some highly toxic chemicals that could be potentially leaking into our water tables," said Kaminski

"There's numerous makeup in the chemicals on this thing," Fugua said. "The majority of them are cancer-causing."

Consider uranium: the underrated element of awe //

Back to energy density: uranium metal really packs a punch. It is 1.67 times more dense than lead, and 1 kilogram of uranium-235 contains 2 to 3 million times the energy equivalent of 1 kg of oil or coal. This means that a relatively small quantity of nuclear fuel can produce significant amounts of energy through fission. How does uranium compare to other fuels? Calculations vary a little, but through fission, 1 kg of enriched uranium corresponds to roughly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal. That’s a lot of raw material that can be left in the ground. //

A single nuclear fuel pellet in a typical reactor creates about the same amount of energy as one tonne of coal. //

nuclear energy stands its ground. It’s reliable and dependable, with the highest capacity factor of all energy sources, which means that power plants produce maximum power more than 92% of the time during the year. That’s almost twice as much as natural gas and coal and nearly three times more than wind and solar farms.

Since less raw material is needed to create the same amount of power, nuclear energy also has a very small land footprint compared to the alternatives. More land is required to mine the coal and dig the metals and minerals used in wind turbines and solar panels out of the ground, and for the sites they are built on, which makes it the most land-efficient source of energy. //

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Interestingly, no eco-activists are blockading the roads into Reinhardswald (site of Sleeping Beauty Castle), or tying themselves to trees to protect the “old growth forests” //

The energy suicide of Germany is rapidly becoming legendary.

Legal Insurrection readers will recall that the nation shuttered its last nuclear power plant in 2023. The German government decided to double down on net-zero dreams and renewable energy promises.

Germany is already big on wind: with nearly 30,000 onshore wind turbines, the country trails only the US and China.

But it’s not enough to meet the country’s climate goals. Today, only 0.8% of Germany’s land area is approved for onshore wind energy. By 2032, the government wants to have 2% of land area allocated for onshore wind power. This means installing between 1,000 and 1,500 new turbines a year, or four to five a day by 2030, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently said.

Germany needs wind energy to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2045, a target it’s currently in danger of missing, according to multiple studies. The country also missed its emissions reduction targets the last two years in a row, according to think tank Agora Energiewende. //

A large area of Reinhardswald, an ancient German forest featured in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, is being partially cut down in favour of 241-metre tall wind turbines.

Following a months-long construction freeze, administrative courts have allowed heavy machinery to raze parts of the forest, including some trees that are more than 200 years old.

Around 120,000 trees in the 200km² mountainous woodland in the Weser Uplands in the district of Kassel, Hesse, are said to have been condemned to the axe. //

Germany passed legislation in 2019 to shut down all its coal plants by 2038, and last year the country shuttered the last three plants in its once-formidable nuclear fleet (in 1990 nuclear provided a quarter of Germany’s electricity).

As a result, the country has been forced to import electricity and natural gas at substantially higher prices. Germany has recently been delaying planned closures of coal plants and is now also planning new gas plants as well, but the damage has been done. Germany now has some of the highest prices for electricity in the world.

As a result, the entire German economy is in the doldrums. Growth forecasts for this year were recently slashed to just 0.2%, and as inflation is forecast to come in at about 2%, that implies actual economic contraction. Other indicators are also dire, with orders at German engineering firms and overall foreign investment dropping dramatically. //

The study found that the older a tree is, the better it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. In fact, the research suggests that almost 70 per cent of all the carbon stored in trees is accumulated in the last half of their lives. //

smooth | March 12, 2024 at 8:51 am
But the climate extremists always say plant more trees to remove CO2 from the air? //

smooth | March 12, 2024 at 9:40 am
France has 56 nuclear power sites. All EU countries combined have over 160 active nuke power sites. Germany going to boycott them all?

The Gentle Grizzly in reply to smooth. | March 12, 2024 at 9:57 am
Yes. Because the master race knows better. Why do things simply with existing technology when one can do it the German way: needless complexity for the sake of it, and then call it “precision engineering”. //

Random US Citizen
7 hours ago edited
I hope the loons win. Because CA deserves it.

On the other hand, maybe Diablo can claim it identifies as a solar plant and ask CA politicians to pay for energy reassignment surgery?

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

Here’s something the Biden administration and CA Gov. Gavin Newsom haven’t talked about: electric cars actually emit more soot and particulate matter than their gas-powered counterparts—because of their tires. //

the WSJ writers argue that tire wear from the far-heavier EVs is more contaminating:

Where do most particulate emissions attributed to cars come from? California speaks as if their primary source is the tailpipe. That was true in the past. But today most vehicle-related particulate matter comes from tire wear. Cars are heavy, and as their tires rub against the road, they degrade and release tiny, often toxic particles. According to measurements by an emission-analytics firm, in gasoline cars equipped with a particle filter, airborne tire-wear emissions are more than 400 times as great as direct exhaust particulate emissions.

Officials in Sweetwater say an out-of-state company has made their town a dump for the seldom-seen trash created by renewable energy.

By Russell Gold
August 24, 2023

Update, September 25: General Electric filed a lawsuit last week claiming that Global Fiberglass Solutions has failed to fulfill its promise to recycle thousands of blades. GE says it paid the company $16.9 million to recycle about five thousand wind turbine blades, but that GFS instead stockpiled them at facilities in Sweetwater and Iowa. “Only after GFS took millions of dollars from GE, did GFS all but shut down its operations without recycling the Blades,” reads the complaint, filed in U.S. district court in New York.

Simply put, these huge industrial sites – we simply must stop using the friendly-sounding term “farms” to describe them – create all manner of negative consequences for local communities. Consequences like loud noise from wind turbines, hundreds of dead birds and bats sprinkled across the countryside, thousands of acres of productive farm or ranchlands taken out of production for many years if not permanently, spoiled views, enormous “graveyards” filled with 150-foot blades and solar panels popping up all over the place, and impacts to local wind and weather patterns that are only now beginning to be understood. //

One West Texas "blade graveyard" alone contains thousands of used blades; these blades cannot be reused, nor can they practically be recycled. Another graveyard, this one in Newton, Iowa, contains a similar eyesore. One of the companies that manufactures the blades, Global FIberglass, has pledged to find a way to begin recycling the blades, but this has not yet happened—and the blades continue to pile up. //

It's all energy density; it's always energy density. To maintain a modern, technological society, like ours, requires greater energy density, not less. The federal government should be held to account; the Energy Department should, at a minimum, stop subsidizing these boondoggles (and, ideally, should be defunded and disbanded). Our society depends on abundant, cheap, high-density energy. //

redstateuser
10 hours ago edited
One of the links in this article brings you to an article that I think is well worth reading in its entirely. I found it eye-opening as to the waste going on with windmills:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/

In Google Maps, I found the dumping ground located in Sweetwater, Texas but, inexplicably, the aerial view had been doctored to make most of it look like raked dirt, poorly doctored yet detectable. Here it is, and you can compare it to the unretouched image in the linked article:

https://tinyurl.com/3vd3b5f7

Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. -- Paul Ehrlich

https://environmentalprogress.org/why-we-fear-nuclear-1

It'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. -- Amory Lovins, 1977

https://environmentalprogress.org/why-we-fear-nuclear-1

A new paper in PLOS ONE, “Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow’s energy landscape 2”, examines the land use requirements of various alternative energy sources. The paper is open access with the full text available at the link or as a PDF file 5. The results are summarised in the following graphic.

The global energy system has a relatively small land footprint at present, comprising just 0.4% of ice-free land. This pales in comparison to agricultural land use– 30–38% of ice-free land–yet future low-carbon energy systems that shift to more extensive technologies could dramatically alter landscapes around the globe. The challenge is more acute given the projected doubling of global energy consumption by 2050 and widespread electrification of transportation and industry. Yet unlike greenhouse gas emissions, land use intensity of energy has been rarely studied in a rigorous way. Here we calculate land-use intensity of energy (LUIE) for real-world sites across all major sources of electricity, integrating data from published literature, databases, and original data collection. We find a range of LUIE that span four orders of magnitude, from nuclear with 7.1 ha/TWh/y to dedicated biomass at 58,000 ha/TWh/y. By applying these LUIE results to the future electricity portfolios of ten energy scenarios, we conclude that land use could become a significant constraint on deep decarbonization of the power system, yet low-carbon, land-efficient options are available.

“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.

The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. //

It turned out that over 200 tons of hydrogen was released from the Bulqizë mine each year. Donzé’s team went there to figure out where all this hydrogen was coming from.

The rocks did not contain enough hydrogen to reach that sort of flow rate. One possible explanation is the hydrogen being released as a product of an ongoing geological process called serpentinization. “But for this to happen, the temperature in the mine would need to reach 200–300 degrees Celsius, and even then, it would not produce 200 tons per year,” said Donzé. “So the most probable was the third option—that we have a reservoir,” he added. //

Bulqizë was entirely different. The gas pushed out of the Bulqizë mine is 84 percent hydrogen, one of the highest concentrations on record. Moreover, the hydrogen was not dissolved in water—it bubbled through Bulqizë’s underground pools, making them look like a jacuzzi. //

So Donzé’s team got busy looking for such places, and they found one. “There is a mine in Ural, central Russia, that has the exact same geological configuration as Bulqizë: harzburgite, dunite, and chromite,” said Donzé. “And guess what. They have a problem with explosions.”